No surprises on funding commentary

The truth remains that the commonwealth already offers AGSRC-based per capita student grants which, in the case of primary students is more generous than the new SRS amount but in the case of secondary students (which far outnumber primary students attending all Australian schools) is less than the current recurrent payment from Canberra.

Allocating a conservative 5% average school cost increase for the new 2014 school year over the 2012 AGSRC index would create the following per capita actual costs of educating a child in a government school:

Primary students $10,550, costs significantly above the SRS offer

Secondary students $13,065, costs significantly above the SRS offer

Both expenditure/cost levels are higher than the respective amounts being offered by the current government under the SRS allocation.

The federal government has made great play that any additional funding will be determined through a range of loading assessments depending on school location, size, indigenous students, disadvantaged students, English language teaching requirements, etc but the unanswered question remains for state-based funding allocations: how will Canberra determine individual school loading criteria and then impose those allocations onto essentially state-based school bureaucracies?

The administrative complexity of such negotiations beggars belief. How an incoming ALP government hopes to adequately reconcile its school loading criteria to the non-government school sector remains unanswered when it's abundantly clear the majority of those loadings covering educational disadvantage will rightly flow to public schools.

4. That money from 'both state and federal sources will follow the student no matter which school in which sector they attend'.

All schools receive both federal and state funding allocations. The level of direct commonwealth funding to the non-government sector remains proportionally higher than to the public sector although public education receives massive commonwealth funding support through COAG agreements.

The actual level of financial underpinning going to each public school remains blurred as state bureaucracies make subsequent funding allocations within the sector whereas individual commonwealth payments to independent schools are separately itemised and so can be more readily publicised by critics of sector recurrent funding.

Critics of recurrent funding to the non-government sector conveniently fail to ignore the funding contribution made to all schools by ALL governments, federal and state. In 2009-10 the recurrent per capita funding from ALL governments applied to the following school recipients:

Government schools $14,380 per student