Teacher shortages in the public school sector need to be urgently addressed as campaigns for public school funding sit in a legislative deadlock after Australia’s largest states failed to reach a funding agreement with the Commonwealth, industry experts have warned.
Queensland, Victoria, NSW, and South Australia have refused to sign Education Minister Jason Clare’s offer of a 2.5 per cent increase to the Commonwealth’s share of the public school funding arrangement. The states are instead holding out for a 5 per cent increase from the Commonwealth, which they began lobbying for in the lead up to the federal budget back in May.
State education ministers Prue Car, Di Farmer and Blair Boyer publicly called on the Commonwealth to take action towards public school underfunding, expressing limitations in the size of their smaller state budgets.
The states currently stand as the primary funders of the public school sector, providing 75 per cent of total funding, while the federal government provides 20 per cent. This means that there is a 5 per cent gap in the required SRS funding for public schools.
The SRS (Schooling Resource Standard) or ‘Gonski level’, is a yearly estimate of the funding required to meet the unique educational requirements of each Australian school.
The federal government will work towards lowering the funding gap for the states who signed onto the 2.5 per cent offer, as part of the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement. The agreement which comes into effect in 2025 and will run until 2034, will officially remove the federal government’s funding cap of 20 per cent for public schools in the Northern Territory, Western Australia, and Tasmania.
For Queensland, Victoria, NSW, and South Australia, the 20 per cent funding cap will remain in place for the next 12 months.
With a national agreement of the Gonski Review established over a decade ago to solve education inequality in Australia, the funding dispute has left many teachers frustrated with the state and federal governments failure to work together, locking campaigns for public education in stalemate.
We cannot keep relying on their goodwill while battering them with chronic underfunding and excessive workloads.
In the case of NSW public schools, teachers and lobbyists blame past NSW governments and the Department of Education for prioritising funding towards administration roles rather than permanent teaching positions.
The NSW Teachers Federation believes schools were overwhelmed with administrative tasks that were ‘extraneous’ to learning and failed to address the 86 per cent of NSW school principals who reported teacher shortages in 2024.
President of the NSW Teachers Federation, Henry Rajendra, said an urgency was needed to address teacher shortages in the public school sector.
“Our teachers do remarkable work and the ones I meet on a daily basis are stretching scarce resources as far as possible,” he told Central News.
“We cannot keep relying on their goodwill while battering them with chronic underfunding and excessive workloads.”
The Local Schools, Local Decisions policy introduced by Barry O’Farrell’s Coalition government in 2012, is one of the specific policies blamed for the teacher shortage crisis. The policy saw school principals tasked with allocating funds from a needs-based perspective.
While the change was intended to decentralise decision-making and meet the specific needs of individual schools, control of funds remained with the department and there was insufficient guidance provided to principals.
NSW undoing mistakes
The department has, however, taken action towards addressing these policy failures.
In May of this year, it confirmed to the NSW Teachers Federation its intention to negotiate a revitalised School Staffing Entitlement. The entitlement would regulate the balance between permanent teachers, casual teachers, and administration roles.
It has also committed itself to ‘winding back’ elements of the Local Schools, Local Decisions policy, recognising that there was ‘no overall improvement on student outcomes’.
NSW Deputy Premier and Education Minister, Prue Car, believes the previous Coalition government ‘kneecapped’ public school funding through administrative overstaffing and undelivered maintenance works.
“Over their 12 years in Government, the Liberals and Nationals badly neglected local communities school infrastructure needs and presided over the state’s worst ever teacher shortage crisis,” she said.
“We have made progress on our plan to rebuild public education… delivering NSW teachers the biggest pay rise in a generation. The Minns Labor government is building better communities with $8.9 billion to continue delivering a massive pipeline of school infrastructure in rapidly growing parts of Western Sydney and regional NSW.”
While the NSW government has been criticised for cutting $148 million from public education in the state’s 2024 budget, it maintains this reflected declining public school enrolments. The government also rejected suggestions the cuts came in response to their recent 10.5 per cent teacher pay rise.
NSW public schools are not receiving the budgets to meet student learning outcomes despite containing the highest proportion of disadvantaged children. Image: Rafael Benari. Licensed through iStock.
Pointing fingers
The federal government has historically maintained that public school funding is an issue for the states, as the primary funders of the sector.
Meanwhile, states and territories say they cannot lift their funding contribution to fill the 5 per cent gap, citing limitations in their smaller budget size.
But the recent discovery of a funding ‘loophole’ enacted by the Morrison government, was revealed to have allowed both levels of government to deliver less than their required contribution.
The policy established in 2018 under the Coalition government, enabled states and territories to spend up to 4 per cent of allocated SRS funding on unrelated expenses such as public transport, capital depreciation, and regulatory costs.
A 2023 report from economist Adam Rorris showed that the accounting trickery was only applied by the Commonwealth and state governments to public schools, and was not applied to private schools.
Public schools are said to have lost $13 billion in the six years since the provision was introduced.
Rorris says there needs to be more communication between state governments and the Commonwealth to separate their public education responsibilities and end the cycle of blame-shifting.
“School funding [is] like a spaghetti junction of overlapping funds… Dysfunctional funding [is] contributing to declining performances across the board,” he said.
Federal favouritism
The Commonwealth has also faced criticism for prioritising funds towards private schools.
The NSW Teachers Federation says the federal government can afford lifting public school funding, if it can afford to overfund private schools.
‘The federal government must step up and meet its half of the bargain, through a 75-25 split with NSW,” says Rajendra.
“Public funds must prioritise public schools. When private schools are ordering sandstone blocks from Scotland or building theatres and sporting facilities in the tens of millions of dollars, the notion that they are receiving ‘correct’ funding under the SRS is beyond laughable.”
Recent data from the Australian Education Union revealed that in 2022 there were 536 NSW private schools receiving more combined government funding than NSW public schools.
Figures from a 2019 Senate estimates briefing showed the funding disparity primarily came from the federal government.
Private schools and public funds
The Association of Independent Schools NSW maintains that all private schools receive the correct amount of funding under the SRS.
A spokesperson from the AINSW said: “The claim that private schools are receiving more than government schools is not true.”
The AINSW has turned to state government as the ones responsible for NSW public schools underfunding, as the primary funder of public schools.
The organisation asserts that reducing private school funding will not address the NSW government’s neglect of public school teachers and facilities.
“We agree that public schools should be funded according to the Schooling Resource Standard, but the state government has not met their obligation to public schools… You don’t take money from one place to give to another. They’ve reduced funding to our sector, but public school funding by state governments has not gone up.”
Public school enrolments have dropped by a staggering 24,000 students since 2020, according to the Department of Education.
The AINSW views the increasing enrolments of students in the independent school sector as justification for the size of their SRS allocation.
But teachers unions and lobbyists continue to question why public funds need to be allocated to these schools at all, as they are private sector, commercial operations that can self-fund.
Image credit: Lincoln Beddoe. licensed under iStock. Rafael Benari. licensed under iStock.
