November 6, 2024:

There are few things more important than the education of our children. A quality education system is and should be a primary aspiration for every country on the planet because education changes lives and improves societies. But this aspiration can only be fully realised when our education system is founded in both quality and equity. There is a clear correlation between the quality of a country's educational system and its general economic status and overall wellbeing. A high quality and equitable education system costs money, there is no getting around that. But, apart from health care and protecting our planet, there is no better objective, in my opinion, for a society to channel its resources towards.

What is currently happening to create a better and fairer education system for all Australians? The bill we're debating today comes about because the National School Reform Agreement is expiring at the end of this year. It is to be replaced with a Better and Fairer Schools Agreement which will run for the next 10 years. The stated purpose of the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement is to ensure all public schools receive full and fair funding and to put every public school on a path to 100 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard. This Schooling Resource Standard, known as the SRS, was conceived in the 2011 Gonski review and is the estimated amount of the total public funding required for each school to meet the needs of its students. When the SRS is 100 per cent, a school is considered fully funded.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority data shows that 98 per cent of private schools are funded above the SRS recommended by Gonski and more than 98 per cent of public schools are funded below it—excellent news for the independent schools, but obviously a long way to go for the public schools. The ACT is the only jurisdiction in the country that has achieved 100 per cent SRS funding. The Northern Territory is the lowest at 76 per cent. The rest hover in the high 80s or low 90s percentile. Until now, public schools have been chronically underfunded, with the Commonwealth contributing 20 per cent of the SRS and the states supposed to be contributing 80 per cent. However, the states in general have not met this mark, contributing just 75 per cent, and there has been a persistent 5 per cent gap in funding.

The fact is that public schools starved of resources have difficulty offering face-to-face teaching in the most demanding senior school subjects, let alone the full range of educational experience in the arts, physical education and competitive sport. One of the school leaders in my youth partnership program explained to me that she and other students at the local state high school 'are beginning to teach themselves'. Teachers are taking sick days as a poor attempt to stay afloat and students' educational needs are being neglected.

I visited the local state high school closest to my office on the northern beaches in Sydney, at the invitation of the P C, who were desperate for support. I was deeply shocked at the substandard conditions of the school: toilets with no doors, staircases blocked off—too dangerous to use—leaking gas in the chemistry labs, mould on the ceilings, floors and walls, ripped up carpet and leaking roofs throughout the school, with committed and passionate teachers trying desperately to advocate for their students. I must admit, I was close to tears when I saw that the same art textbooks being used at that school were the same ones I used when I was in year 7, 40 years previously. What message are we sending our young people about the importance of education, if this is what we are offering them?

From a funding point of view, the Commonwealth is agreeing to lift its share of the SRS from 20 per cent to 22.5 per cent, in return for the states and territories lifting their share from 75 per cent to 77.5 per cent. Importantly, that funding cannot go backwards. It is a floor, not a ceiling, thank goodness. To date, the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Tasmania have signed up to the agreement. Funding arrangements aside, in signing on to the agreement, all governments around Australia commit to targeted reforms focused on three priority areas: equity and excellence, wellbeing for learning and engagement and a strong and sustainable workforce. It is the first of these priority areas that I want to focus on today, and that will be the subject of my second reading amendment. Nowhere should the goal of equity be more important than in our public school system. The ordinary meaning of 'equity' is important here, because it is quite different from equality. To be treated with equity is to be treated with fairness and justice, whereas equality means providing the same to all. Equity means recognising that we do not all start from the same place, and we need to acknowledge and adjust for imbalances.

This is also the fundamental proposition of the Gonski philosophy of needs based funding. This is where all students in schools are funded but those who need more support receive extra loadings. It's a very simple proposition, and it's disappointing that the Gonski reforms were not implemented in full. It is this difference between the definition of 'equity' in the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement and that in the Gonski review that forms the basis of the second reading amendment that I am introducing today. I now move the amendment as circulated in my name: The amendment was unavailable at the time of publishing.

The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement describes an equitable outcome as one where:
… all students are provided access to high-quality evidence-based teaching that is inclusive, where young Australians of all backgrounds and levels of need are supported to achieve their full educational potential.

That does not properly reflect the true essence of equity, which is the idea that some students will need more help than others—that they will need a higher level of support. Gonski's dual equity target does exactly that, requiring that all students should complete a level of education that enables them to participate in the workforce and lead successful lives—this means completing high school—and differences in student outcomes should not be the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions. Low income, Indigenous, regional, remote area and other disadvantaged student groups should achieve similar outcomes to the more advantaged students. It is this idea that differences in student outcomes should not be the result of differences in wealth or geography or intrinsic advantages that is critical. My second reading amendment simply seeks to swap one definition for another.

Education scholars Glenn Savage and Pasi Sahlberg have lamented the inadequate definition of equity preferred by the government. They are also disappointed that the agreement lacks specific targets to narrow achievement gaps between students from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds. The only specific target in the agreement for disadvantaged students is that there should be a 'trend upwards' in the proportion of higher NAPLAN proficiency trends. There is another target, the learning equity target, which requires the proportion of students achieving a NAPLAN level—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives— Sitting suspended from 16:18 to 16:34

As I was saying, there is another target, the learning equity target, which requires the proportion of students achieving a NAPLAN level A or B for reading and numeracy to increase by 10 per cent, and the proportion of those in level D to decrease by 10 per cent, by 2030. But such targets are not required to be met until schools are fully funded under the agreement, which is when they will receive 100 per cent funding for each student. Even worse, when they are fully funded, there will be no penalties for failing to comply with the agreement. The experts are saying the targets are, in any event, too weak to make Australian school education fairer. What this may do instead, they say, is raise overall student outcomes but increase the achievement gap. In other words, the high-achieving students may improve and leave the lower-achieving students where they are now or, worse still, going backwards. We saw this happen in a similar program in Ontario, Canada, 20 years ago. The program there failed because, in order to achieve targets, schools focused on students whose standardised scores were just below the target levels and did not provide extra support to the students with the lowest scores, who are, of course, the ones who need the most help.

There is not necessarily a correlation between improving overall school results and equity. A rising tide does not necessarily lift all boats. Australia is the land of the fair go. For that to remain true, our education system must be firmly grounded in equity. Anything less is selling future generations short.