Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

It is the case that Australia provides above average funding for schools. I am pleased to inform Senator Dastyari that when you consider both public and private investment in school education we have above average funding compared with the rest of the OECD. But what Senator Dastyari and others seem to focus on is a false view that funding equals outcomes. Funding is an input. Of course, the Labor Party have an attitude where they believe that more money is the solution to everything. More money is not the solution to everything.

What we know, just from the most recent NAPLAN data that is out, is that some of those schools who increased their performance in that NAPLAN data had significant growth in funding, but an almost equal number of schools who did so well in increasing their performance had a reduction in their funding. So you can see that what actually happens on the ground matters far more than the amount of inputs going in. It is about the quality of the teachers, the content of the curriculum, and the teaching practices and pedagogies that are applied. These are the things that our government has rightly focused on. We know that funding is important but we know that how you use it matters more.

We know that school funding in Australia is at a record level at present. Yet our results in terms of international comparison and real performance in literacy and numeracy have gone backwards despite record funding increase. So perhaps we should ask the question at present: what more can we do to spend that money better? How can we spend that money better and more wisely to get a better outcome? How can we ensure that children are benefiting from the record investment in funding going into schools rather than simply doing what those opposite propose, which is putting ever more money in without ever asking the question: how do you make sure you get the best results for students?— (Time expired)