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To save our public schools Labor must deliver 100% funding by January 2025
Last year about 130,000 public school kids finished up their final year of highschool.
That’s 130,000 kids who have never experienced a public school that wasn’t underfunded.
For the entirety of their schooling life, it was always stretching money, cuts and layoffs.
This year, another hundred thousand or so public school kids will graduate also never going to a school that wasn’t underfunded.
And the year after that.
And likely the year after that.
This is a national crisis that is affecting kids today and of the future.
Public schools are now underfunded by 6.6 billion a year.
Since the original Gonski Review, government funding to private schools has INCREASED at double the rate of public schools.
The major parties have withheld 26.9 billion from public schools and plugged that money into the private system.
Public school investment in Australia is BELOW the OECD average.
The funding shortfall is about more than just numbers though.
Underfunding means classrooms built in the 70s that are filled with asbestos or mildew and mould.
Underfunding means teachers working 12 hour days and covering the work of counsellors, administrators, social workers, and educators all in one.
Underfunding means these teachers are not paid for the hours they pour into marking and preparation, school events and excursions over nights and weekends.
Underfunding means one teacher for dozens of kids.
It means broken laptops, out of date textbooks and parents footing the bills.
Above all underfunding means kids slipping through the cracks. It means failing. It means not setting them up for success, and it means widening inequality in this country.
Underfunding means that when NAPLAN results come out it’s not surprising that so many of our young people are struggling. Because when teachers and schools don’t have the resources they need to support our most educational disadvantaged students, results go down.
And every time this happens Labor and the Coalition start the distraction game.
It must be our poorly trained teachers.
Or maybe it’s the way we teach reading.
Or maybe it’s naughty kids or bad parenting.
Anything to distract the public’s attention from the nub of the problem which is chronic underfunding.
Underfunding means a kick in the teeth for Australian egalitarianism.
We are desperately running out of time.
I hear time and time again from teachers who are overworked and at the brink.
From comrades who are plugging holes and buying classroom resources and even food for their students.
From parents who can’t fathom what’s happened to their local public schools.
Australia and our kids are suffering for it.
At every opportunity to fix this, Labor has folded.
They backed off from Gonski. Their crowning education achievement, and they backed off what it actually called for. Which is clawing money back from the private sector and putting it into the public one.
10 years later the gap still remains.
The money is pouring into the private sector.
And now we have one of the most segregated school systems in the world.
Right now nearly every private school in this country is overfunded.
And not only are they filled over and above the SRS with government money, they also charge huge fees over the top of that.
The public is literally paying for private schools to succeed.
We are footing the bill for plunge pools and orchestra pits.
We are footing the bill for these schools to charge exorbitant fees.
Fees that are locking out kids and locking in inequality.
Right now there is no pathway back.
Labor needs to own up to its neoliberal mistakes and take responsibility for its role in Australia’s surging inequality. That starts with rebuilding public education.
This is the last chance we have to save our public schools. To truly deliver an equitable school system that gives every child a chance at a great life.
The Labor Government must fund all public schools to 100% at the start of the next agreement, or they’ve cosigned our public schools to collapse.