An audit has blamed the Queensland education department for “poor financial stewardship” of a remote Indigenous school and its staff for mistakes that led to student enrolments being “routinely overstated”.
The Queensland audit office report found “no evidence of financial impropriety” in the administration of funding for the Aurukun school, jointly run by the department and the Noel Pearson-chaired Good to Great Schools Australia.
But the report, tabled in state parliament on Thursday, found the department had shown poor financial oversight and “breakdowns in its internal controls”, with the school inflating its effective enrolment numbers by 116 students between 2010 and 2016.
This led to the department giving the school an extra $815,000.
However, the department’s spending of $9m on the partnership with GGSA over that time was “significantly lower” than its approved budget of $12.5m, the report found.
The QAO found “no evidence of any deliberate manipulation of effective enrolment numbers”, but said the inflation was “driven by school staff’s incorrect interpretation of [department] enrolment policy and guidelines, and poor record-keeping”.
Enrolment documentation was incomplete and not stored securely, and school staff failed to “confirm the identity, custody and age of children”.
This raised the risks of “students being enrolled too young, without the school knowing their legal guardians, and the personal data of students being accessed inappropriately”.
The report found expense claims submitted by GGSA “appear reasonable” in the absence of a binding agreement with the department that would spell out “sufficient terms and conditions”.
GGSA decided to pull out of Aurukun school last year but remains in a partnership with the department over two smaller remote Indigenous schools at Hope Vale and Coen.
Pearson said the report showed the department had “serious problems” but gave a “clean bill of health” to GGSA’s financial and administrative practices around the school.
These had been under scrutiny after concerns raised in a series of internal department audits of the school.
Internal department audits in 2014 and 2015 had identified “high risk” issues at the school.
These included “lack of clarity for some staff about roles and responsibilities, poor controls over the effectiveness and efficiency of operations, lack of compliance with policies and procedures and absence of proper supervision”.
Last year a departmental audit raised concerns with the level of supporting documentation for a 2014 transfer of $202,460 from the school bank account to GGSA, however the QAO said it assessed the arrangement as a “grant” under state Treasury guidelines and the documentation was acceptable.
It found most of the high risk issues were still “unresolved” but that a “key reason was the high turnover of school leadership roles”.
Pearson said the “forensic findings of the QAO put to rest all slurs made against the professionalism and integrity of GGSA.”
The report “clarifies the failure of [the department] to ensure the appropriate conduct of operations and the equally important confirmation that GGSA played no role or had responsibility in these matters”, he said.
It overturned “careless assumptions” made in the internal department audits, Pearson said.
“GGSA places on record our dismay and concern at the curious release of sections of those previous reports to media, which damaged GGSA’s reputation and jeopardised our students’ education,” he said.
“Those within the department responsible for the leaking should be exposed and held to account.”
A key bone of contention in the Aurukun school was GGSA’s use of the US-imported “Direct Instruction” curriculum. The heavily-scripted remedial program has divided education experts and faced criticism from former Aurukun school staff and the community.
The QAO said its audit “does not assess the method of teaching delivered at the three [GGSA] schools or outcomes”.
The report found signs of dysfunction in the partnership between the department and GGSA, which had been operating under an “outdated” memorandum of understanding since 2009.
Despite “extensive negotiations”, the two parties had not yet reached a formal agreement clearly spelling out the “roles and responsibilities” of each.
This reduced the department’s “ability to manage towards the planned outcomes”, being to “improve educational outcomes for Indigenous children in Cape York”.
“When the relationship was tested, the lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities between partners, combined with differing perspectives about what the partnership meant, has led to increased distrust and stalled negotiations in formalising a suitable agreement,” the report found.
Pearson said GGSA was “pleased to note that there are no recommendations demanding of GGSA any actions other than the negotiation of a formal governance arrangement, an outcome we too have been seeking from [the department] since 2014”.
The education minister, Kate Jones, said the department would accept all three of the report’s recommendations to “improve partnership arrangements for the future”.
These were binding agreements for any funding deals with external education providers, adequate training and supervision of staff, and reviews of governance arrangements for the “timely” delivery of internal audit recommendations.
The report said that without “proactive” management and clear performance measures, including cost-effectiveness and whether community objectives are being met, “the spirit of a partnership, where partners agree to cooperate to advance mutual interests, can be at risk of being a partnership in name only”.
Pearson said the report confirmed GGSA was responsible for providing “the school’s strategic direction of teaching and learning” while the department employed all school staff and managed all school operations, including facilities and compliance.
