The Guardian 5 March, 2008
Billions,
secretly given to private schools
A report commissioned by the Howard government and conducted behind closed doors in 2006 was only seen at the time by lobbyists from the private-school and Catholic Church-school systems who were invited to comment. The Rudd Government has refused to release it.
It confirms the validity of the Australian Education Union’s (AEU) long-standing opposition to the funding arrangements for Australia’s non-government schools. The report notes that "the consistency and equity of the SES (socio-economic status) funding arrangements is undermined by the fact that almost half the non-government school sector is funded outside the "straight SES model."
The inequity lies in the guarantee from the inception of the SES formula in 2001 that no school will receive less money than it did the previous year.
60 percent of mainstream Catholic schools and 25 percent of independent schools are funded above what would be their SES entitlement on their actual SES scores.
Over the last 4 years $2 billion has been?paid to schools which had their funding maintained at higher levels than they would get if the federal funding formula was strictly applied.
The arrangements by which this occurs?were intended to be transitional yet they have been in place for two quadrenniums and "there is no mechanism that would naturally unwind its effect."
Transitional arrangements made for?Catholic schools to preserve their funding entitlements at 2000 levels, even if they qualified for less when they joined the SES funding system in 2001, have continued at artificially inflated levels for eight years, despite their transitional nature.
The cost of maintaining the existing SES?system would be $26.5 billion over the 2009-2012 quadrennium.
If Funding Maintained schools continue to be funded above their SES entitlement, the private school sector will gain an additional $2.7 billion in overpayments over the next four years. Individual schools will be overpaid by up to $23 million each in the next funding cycle.
The report rejects the private school lobby’s argument that the extra funding helps contain the amount of fees parents pay.
42 per cent of Funding Maintained schools?(87) increased their fees by more than 40 per cent during the period 2000 to 2004 compared to 24 per cent of SES-funded schools (164).
The number of Funding Maintained schools?with annual fees below $2,500 fell by 24 percent (48) compared to a fall of 10 percent (67) for SES-funded schools.
The report also reveals a pattern whereby non-government schools which have already been identified as receiving an overly generous share of government funding are exploiting a loophole to claim even more public money.
The AEU condemns funding arrangements which see the public system under-funded by nearly $3 billion annually while over-funding of private schools is set to cost taxpayers a further $2.7 billion over the next four years.