Australian public school funding falls behind private schools as states fail to meet targets - eviltoast

Calls for special deal to be struck for NT, which has biggest funding gap between public and private schools

  • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    You’re just trying to shift focus away from public schools not getting their share of funding

    I’m not trying to do that. And for what it’s worth, myself and everyone in my extended family has gone to state schools. Quite a number of people in my extended family as well as a lot of my friends currently work in state schools. I have seriously considered working at a state school myself.

    Your core assertion was that private schools get more funding. And my reply to that is that it’s complex because schools all receive funding from a myriad of sources.

    If you exclusively count government funding, then Private Schools receive significantly less funding than public schools. But of course, only counting government funding would be silly, since for many schools that’s a fraction of their overall funding.

    The fact is, public schools aren’t getting the funding that was committed

    The Article clearly shows the federal government is providing “the funding that was committed”.

    Unfortunately states are falling short, and yes obviously that needs to be addressed. But I think you’re unaware of just how complex the issue is. The government doesn’t just ask the school “How many students are enrolled? OK here’s that $15k for each one”. The amount of funding a school receives is based on a complex process to determine how much funding the school needs. They need to adjust those processes to increase funding, which isn’t easy especially if you want the money to be spent well and not on something stupid like new carpets… at the same time if a school needs new carpets then they should absolutely get that.

    The reason private schools get all of the funding they’re entitled to is because the process to calculate that is so much simpler. As far as I know it’s basically, “how many students to you have? How affluent are the parents of those students? You get this much per student”. It’s easy to get that right.

    But anyway - mostly what I wanted to say is the government provides less funding to private schools - by approximately several thousand dollars per year per student - approximately because the exact amount is different for every school.