The Greens say new OECD data showing Australia’s most disadvantaged school students falling further behind their more privileged peers should be the wake-up call Labor needs to finally deliver full funding to public schools.
The 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, the first published since 2018, reveals a growing gap between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged students in mathematics performance, a worrying sign that inequity is increasingly baked in to the school system.
Some of the report’s key findings include:
- The average performance of Australian students across reading, mathematics and science continues to trend downwards
- Advantaged students outperformed their disadvantaged peers by 101 points in mathematics, higher than the OECD average of 93 and a rise of 20 points since 2018
- The gap between the highest performing students and the weakest students widened in mathematics and science
- 61% of school principals reported their capacity to provide instruction was hindered by a lack of teaching staff, a 44% jump from 2018
As stated by Greens spokesperson on Education (Primary and Secondary) Senator Penny Allman-Payne:
“The PISA report reveals that not only is the average performance of Australian students continuing to trend downwards, Australia’s school system is increasingly unequal, with the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students widening over the past four years.
“Only 1.3% of public schools in Australia receive their bare minimum funding. Meanwhile, 98% of private schools are overfunded by governments, and they continue to charge ever-growing private fees, compounding the inequity.
“In the decade since Gonski, combined recurrent funding from Commonwealth, state and territory governments to Independent schools increased 34.04%, while spending on Catholic schools grew 31.17%. Spending on public schools only increased 16.92%.
“First Nations kids, kids in regional, rural and remote areas, neurodivergent and disabled kids, kids experiencing poverty and housing insecurity – when our governments make the choice to leave our public system underfunded, this is who they’re choosing to abandon.
“Labor and the Coalition’s collective failure means we do not have the sector-blind, needs-based funding system that Gonski proposed and all governments signed on to. What we have is the opposite of that: a sector-based, needs-blind Frankenstein stitched together with dodgy deals and caveats.
“With the new National School Reform Agreement and bilateral deals to be negotiated in coming months, and Labor in power federally and across the mainland, this is an historic opportunity to end a decade of false dawns and broken promises and deliver 100% SRS funding to every public school by January 2025.”
