Member of the Gonski Review panel, and former NSW Education Department Director-General, Ken Boston, writes in Inside Story (6.9.16) about how governments began watering down the Gonski school-funding recommendations “right from the start”.
‘The Gonski review is history. The Gonski panel submitted its report in December 2011, and the government responded in February 2012. There have been two federal elections since then.
‘It is timely to revisit that history: what we as a panel were asked to do; what we found; what we recommended; what the government did with the report; what happened as a result; and the current situation.
‘… Australian education will not recover until we have a government prepared to establish an entirely new basis for our school funding. We need an educationally driven, sector-blind, needs-based school resourcing standard for all schools: based on hard evidence; designed to achieve specified and measurable outcomes; applied to all school sectors; agreed by the states, territories and Commonwealth; and accepted nationally as the affordable, efficient and effective price of building our national stock of human capital.’
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- National education evidence base: Productivity Commission draft report »
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- FactCheck: has education spending gone up while student achievement has stalled or declined? »
- The Gonski review promised fairer schools funding. A decade on, these experts say it hasn’t been delivered »
- The Gonski ‘failure’: why did it happen and who is to blame for the ‘defrauding’ of public schools? »