Christian schools have embraced the Commonwealth Government’s decision to increase funding to government schools.
“Christian schools want to ensure that all students are properly funded, including students in government schools”, said Mark Spencer, Director of Public Policy for Christian Schools Australia.
“All students in Australia deserve a high-quality education”, he said, “and the additional funding by the Commonwealth to increase their funding share to 22.5% of the School Resource Standard (SRS) for Government schools is welcomed”.
“The Gonski funding model ensures that student needs are front and centre”, Mr Spencer said, “and the Commonwealth government is clearly paying its fair share”.
However, directly comparing the SRS funding between government and non-government schools is misleading. The base funding amount for a student in a non-government school is discounted by the ‘capacity to contribute’ of school parents, it is ‘means-tested’ unlike government schools.
“The calculated SRS funding for a non-government school will be less than that applicable to a government school with an identical student composition”, Mr Spencer said.
“Saying that a non-government school is funded at 100% of its SRS is still saying that it receives less funding than those students would receive in a government school”, he noted.
