AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL FOR THE DEFENCE OF GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS

PRESS RELEASE 345

20 December 2009

WHEN WILL GILLARD PUBLISH EXACT FUNDING FIGURES FOR

PRIVATE RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS?

Gillard urged to publish funding details

According to Dan Harrison of the Sydney Morning Herald on 16 September 2009, Primary school principals and the education union called upon the Education Minister, Julia Gillard, to abandon plans to publish individual schools' results in national tests until she can also publish how much funding each school receives.

The nation's education ministers have agreed to publish a range of information about every school online before the end of the year, but do not plan to publish information about each school's financial resources until next year.

A report commissioned by education ministers last year concluded that while providing information about the financial resources available to individual schools could be useful, it was ''a radical proposal'', because such information was not uniformly available, and some states were not currently able to report such information at the school level.

The president of the Australian Primary Principals Association, Leonie Trimper, said some schools received as much as $10,000 per student more than others. ''We must ensure that schools can be judged on the full amount of information, not just the test results alone,'' she said.

The federal president of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, said publishing test results without funding details would give parents an incomplete picture of how their school was performing.

''There are many factors affecting educational outcomes. The absence of information on total schools resourcing makes any comparison of school performance misleading and potentially harmful,'' he said.

Ms Gillard said ''every effort'' was being made to ensure that the collection and reporting of data was consistent across all schools.

''It is the Government's firm view, however, that parents and the community have already been waiting too long for this information and these differences should not delay the provision of comprehensive information … about how our schools are going and which schools need a hand.''

Comment:

A number of observations about the obvious difficulties inherent in State government reports on funding.

• Before State governments can report on total funding of private religious schools they are forced to trust information provided by religious corporate bureaucracies. There is little if any verification process on basic information like actual enrolments. Yet enrolment figures are the basis for billions of dollars of direct taxpayer funding of these schools. There have been instances of ghost pupils, ghost teachers and even ghost schools. ( See Press Release 266 at www.adogs.info/pr266.htm and Press Release 270 at www.adogs.info/pr270.htm ) Taxpaying citizens have no reason to believe enrolment figures produced by religious bodies.

• The Commonwealth Auditor General’s report (ANAO Audit Report No. 45 2008-09) pointed to the ‘risks to accuracy of data provided by non-government schools’, in spite of the fact ‘that incorrect census data or SES data leads to incorrect funding levels being calculated…such as by schools inaccurately entering student address data into the SES website or overseas full-fee paying students into the census on the Internet.’

• The Auditor General also discovered that ‘the successful contractors for the Financial Questionnaire Verification exercise and the Census Post-enumeration exercise lacked relevant skills and experience, or a full understanding of departmental procedures and appropriate documentation which results in inaccurate and incorrect outcomes for these exercises’.

• The Auditor General also noted ‘that the sampling methodology for the selection of schools participating in the Financial Questionnaire Verification and Census Post-enumeration exercises was not adequate to provide the desired outcomes for these processes.’

• It should be also noted that only a ridiculously small sample of religious school enrolment information has ever been ‘verified’. (See Press Release 266 at www.adogs.info/pr266.htm and Press Release 270 at www.adogs.info/pr270.htm ).

• From the very beginning of the giving of State Aid in the 1960s, and more particularly since the “Needs” policy was introduced in 1973, the private school bureaucracies have diverted taxpayer dollars from primary to secondary education and from genuinely disadvantaged schools to new ‘needy’ schools. This was exposed by the DOGS in newspaper Advertisements in the 1970s and 1980s. ( See The Age : 16 May 1973, 10; 12 July 1973, 14; 12 December 1975, 12 ; 23 June 1977, 16; 2 December 1977; 5 December, 1977, 12; 3 May 1984, 18; 28 November 1984, 20; 1 May 1985.)

• Any comprehensive funding information concerning private schools the State and Federal Governments provide to taxpayers would need to include taxation expenditures or taxation exemptions enjoyed by the schools by virtue of the fact that they are private religious institutions. These figures are notoriously difficult to obtain but are part of a $70 billion ‘purple economy’. See Max Wallace, The Purple Economy (2008). Both governments and the private sector avoid mention of this funding ‘ice-berg’.

• Information about resourcing of private religious schools should also contain private funding obtained from parent fees; building funds; underwriting of interest payments; private trusts; private endowments, property and other investment funds.

• Estimates of funding for public schools should take into account incremental costs incurred for provision of resources and schools in expensive areas avoided by the private sector.

DOGS are not holding their breath concerning proper transparency and accountability for expenditure of public funds by private religious corporations.

What is of greater concern is the disinclination of Government Ministers at both State and Federal level to demand proper transparency and accountability in the basic provision of information. None of them take their Ministerial responsibility seriously enough to confront the ‘cancer in the body politic’.

Yet Gillard has the gall to push ahead with publication of discredited League Tables in a thinly veiled naming and shaming of disadvantaged public schools.

DEFEND PUBLIC EDUCATION AND STOP STATE AID TO PRIVATE RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS.

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