Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think there is uniform agreement that we want to fund schools as generously as possible but, ultimately, to fund a school, you have to raise the revenue. Obviously, in a post-commodity boom, it is always going to be a little harder than when the money was flowing. I guess the other great indication of passion to a school system is how much you actually fund in the four-year estimates when you are in government. Of course, as we all well know now, Julia Gillard was far more focused on pink batts and the $3.8 billion that went in that direction and instead made all of the school funding that they now refer to into what are called the out years of years 5 and 6. We call them the never-never, when governments can effectively say anything, because they do not have to budget for those amounts. It is a very, very, subtle difference. So, the coalition did commit to Gonski for the four years that a government can. When you talk about out years, you can really put any number you like out there; it really does not matter, because that money must be found in the budget every year, and the reality is Julia Gillard never, ever found that money.

You can have all the views you want, on either side of the chamber, about how much there should be in school funding. What we know is that both sides of politics can wear that merit badge and say, 'We've raised funding for schools way above inflation and way above education inflation, and our schools are now widely recognised as the best resourced and most equitably resourced in the world, bar those in one or two countries.' It is important to keep looking at OECD comparisons. It is not that important in other areas, but in schools we have school students from other parts of the world who are going to university and one day will compete with Australians for jobs. The actual outcomes are quite important, so you do not want to get yourself cornered into a system where you are funding need, because the more you fund need the more you incentivise people to create need. The more you fund outcomes the more you have an incentive to create outcomes. I do not mean to rewrite Labor's textbook on this one, but Labor does not actually know anything about what the difference is between a high-gain and a low-gain school.

Ms Owens interjecting—

It is quite simple—and I know the member for Parramatta is faking a laugh as loudly as she can—but in reality we need to be funding gain in schools. That seems to be fairly relevant. What we do not have at the moment is a system that identifies high-quality educational outcomes and rewards those outcomes, and a system that identifies schools that are struggling and says, 'We can help.' It is one thing to give money based on need, but if half of those schools fix the need and the other half do not, you do not just keep funding need. You have to go to those schools and say, 'What exactly is happening here?' because the additional funding into need is making no difference.

Luckily, again, we can look at Europe, northern Scandinavia and the Asian economies. In most of those examples, your socioeconomic and educational background—your family background—has very little to do with your educational outcomes. You do not need to fund need in those countries because education takes care of it. The very fact that you turn up—you have the dose effect of being exposed to school—

Ms Owens interjecting—

Can we have a mature discussion here, where I respect your point of view, without silly guffaws coming from you, Member for Parramatta? In reality, what we have is an expectation that just because you go to a poor school you should have a poor outcome, and therefore we should fund you because you have more need. In reality, I firmly believe that a school with families from high-need backgrounds can do just as well as families from high-wealth and high-human-capital backgrounds. It can be done, and, in fact, Australia has the largest disparity in educational outcomes related to socioeconomic and educational backgrounds of any country in the world. What it means is that our poor kids are doing very poorly and our wealthy kids are doing very, very well in the state system—I am not talking about two-tier educational systems.

We have all that data from the OECD, and we collect information through TIMSS, PIRLS and a range of other datasets that obviously have not been looked at over here. But in reality we know that we are sitting stagnant—and in some cases slipping—with science and maths, and I am not just talking about PISA. We have a very, very significant problem, and at the same time we have—from none other than the OECD—reports that say additional funding only works in low-funded educational systems. Once you get the systems funded as well as they are in Australia, the Asian economies and northern Europe, the changes in funding do not make much difference. It simply does not make much difference.

We are a nation that can recognise quality and disseminate it. At another time we will go into the significant obstructions that we have in state education systems that do not report on outcomes satisfactorily, do not report on disparities within schools and certainly do not want to put their school leadership under any sort of scrutiny on outcomes. We will slowly get there. I confess that neither side of politics is fully over the hurdle on that one yet, but one day we will recognise quality in our teachers and in our principals. We will reward that and you will see struggling schools increase in their outcomes for the first time.

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