States will continue their campaign for the fifth and sixth years of needs-based education funding deals, setting them on a collision course with the federal government when education ministers meet on Friday.
The federal education minister, Simon Birmingham, will use the meeting to discuss school reforms but will not propose a new funding model, leaving states to wait until the new year to find out how it proposes to fund them from 2018.
The states set to lose the most funding compared with their six-year deals, New South Wales and Victoria, will combine with Labor states Queensland and South Australia to call for more investment in education.
The South Australian education minister, Susan Close, said her state was set to miss out on $335m in 2018 and 2019, after the Turnbull government was re-elected in 2016 without a pledge to restore $29bn over 10 years cut from projected funding growth in the 2014 budget.
NSW calculates it will get $2.1bn less than it was promised in the final two years, while Victoria calculates it will be $1bn worse off.
Western Australia supports the proposed renegotiation of funding agreements. Tasmania has already received assurances from the federal government it will not be left worse off.
Close told Guardian Australia the federal government had not put a formal funding proposal, simply “floated the idea of reapportionment of the existing envelope of funding”.
Asked if her state could benefit from a renegotiation, Close said: “If South Australia were to benefit it could only occur at another jurisdiction’s cost.
“That is unacceptable. I want adequate funding for education in Australia and the ministers will all take a view it’s about increasing the quantum of funding, not shuffling the deckchairs.”
The NSW education minister, Adrian Piccoli, said the state “will continue to press the commonwealth government to fully fund the Gonski agreement”.
In October the NSW premier, Mike Baird, said there was “absolutely no doubt” that needs-based funding benefited students. In a speech to the Primary Principals Association, Piccoli described moves to abandon the fifth and sixth year of Gonski deals as a “war on fairness”.
The Australian Capital Territory education minister, Yvette Berry, said: “The ACT, like most jurisdictions, is hoping the commonwealth will show up willing to engage around the need to honour the final two years of the national education reform agreement.”
As Guardian Australia reported on Saturday, the Victorian education minister, James Merlino, has pushed for a greater role for states in designing a new education funding model.
The federal government will propose a new funding model at the Council of Australian Governments leaders’ meeting in the first half of 2017.
Close warned that conducting talks at the leaders’ level, rather than with education ministers, would not help bypass states’ demands, as premiers would say the same thing – that the federal government can’t abandon the fifth and sixth years of needs-based funding.
Despite the cuts to projected funding growth in agreements negotiated with the previous Gillard Labor government, federal funding for schools will still grow from $16bn in 2016 to about $20.1bn in 2020.
“Everyone agrees that funding needs to be distributed according to need and we all want to help boost student outcomes,” Birmingham said. “I’m looking forward to working with my state and territory colleagues to iron out the problems with the current distribution of funding and to implement reforms in our schools that are proven to lift student performance.”
Victoria has already rejected a number of those reforms, although Coalition-led states NSW and Tasmania argue they have already begun to make changes that mirror reforms proposed by the Turnbull government in May.
Close said the federal reforms were “broadly consistent” with South Australia’s agenda but its government was not interested in the federal government “seeking to dictate to states and say what ought to be done” in schools when it hadn’t honoured funding deals.
In reference to Birmingham citing OECD research that found higher expenditure on education did not guarantee better student performance, Close said states “agree that of course it doesn’t necessarily improve performance, it’s how you spend it”.
“The states run schools, we know how to improve the standards and the price of it.”
Birmingham believes the 27 separate funding agreements negotiated by the Gillard government are inconsistent and “corrupt” the Gonski needs-based funding principles.
Birmingham gave an example that under the current arrangements “a disadvantaged student in one state receives up to $1,500 less federal funding than a student in another state in the exact same circumstance”.
The shadow federal education minister, Tanya Plibersek, has described plans to renegotiate funding deals as amounting to the education minister “pitting state against state, saying some states are doing better than others, school against school and system against system”.
.png?w=600)
