Want to know why our schools keep lagging the world’s best?

The Gonski review intended that the SRS funding generated by a school should be spent on that school, not incorporated into consolidated revenue to be spent at the discretion of the school sector. Quite the opposite has occurred. Far from there being one national funding system, there are eight state and territory funding models and eight Catholic sector funding models. The gap between funding for advantaged schools and disadvantaged schools is steadily widening.

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Moreover, schools are at very different stages in their transition to the SRS. On average, non-government schools (except in the Northern Territory) are over-funded and will remain so for the rest of the decade. Public schools (except in the ACT) are funded at less than 90 per cent of their SRS. Current funding agreements allow state governments to continue to under-fund public schools so that, at best, they will achieve only 91 per cent of their SRS by 2029.

What is to be done? We need to get back to the fundamental narrative of what Gonski is about, to understand its importance for the nation. Gonski is about building our national stock of human capital. It is about raising our national performance. It is about addressing our national deficit in knowledge and skills. It is about taking a place in the top level of OECD countries.

The reason for its focus on socially disadvantaged schools – both government and non-government – is that these are the schools in which the greatest wastage of potential human capital occurs. This waste – this unrealised potential learning – is akin to leaving some precious metal lying in the ground, when investment in its retrieval for the benefit of the individual and the nation would yield a return far greater than the cost.