D-day arrives for Gonski report

2 Sep 2012, 4:57 pm   -   Source: AAP

The government is set to reveal its response to the Gonski recommendations on how to overhaul school funding.

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After much debate and the release of the Gonski review six months ago, Prime Minister Julia Gillard is set to announce what has been billed as a "once-in-a-generation" overhaul of funding for public and private schools.

Ms Gillard will unveil the federal government's response to the Gonski report, led by businessman David Gonski, at the National Press Club in Canberra on Monday.

Public schools are tipped to emerge as the big winners.

The funding model would begin a six-year program to implement the funding changes from 2014, News Limited reported on Sunday.

Since the Gonski panel report on what a new funding system should look like was released on February 20, the government has promised no school would "lose a single dollar" and all schools would get an increase.

But last month Ms Gillard upped the ante, telling a national independent schools conference in Canberra that all "independent schools in Australia will see their funding increase under our plan".

Schools Education Minister Peter Garrett said the review was an opportunity to support the needs of all students in Australian classrooms.

The proposed system, based on the Gonski review panel's recommendations, will see a baseline cash grant given to schools for each student.

"This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to support the needs of every kid in every classroom in Australia," Mr Garrett told reporters in Sydney on Sunday.

"(The Gonski panel's) observation that the funding system was broken was one that the government needed to look closely at and now we are prepared to act on that."

Additional loadings would also be handed to schools for disadvantaged students.

The six loadings relate to low socio-economic status, disability, indigenous students, the size of the school, rural and remote students, and children with poor English, according to News Limited reports.

Transition to the new model is to start in 2014, but it won't be fully implemented until 2020.

But opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne said the government's promise was its "most outlandish" since the last federal election.

"Mr Garrett has been out this morning completely incapable of answering any of the detail about how these promises are to be funded," Mr Pyne told reporters in Adelaide.

"Worse than that, the government has not been able to guarantee that no school will be worse off."

The Australian Education Union wants the Labor government to implement all of the Gonski review's recommendations.

These include significantly increased funding of about $5 billion, with most of it flowing to government schools because they have more disadvantaged students.

Under the current funding arrangements, the commonwealth contributes 30 per cent of the total.

But the Gonski panel suggested the various federal, state and territory players "negotiate more balanced funding roles".

With fiscal pressures making states and territory budgets tight, it may well fall to the federal government to collect most of the tab for any major funding increase.

The federal coalition says the current system - described in the Gonski report as unnecessarily complex and lacking coherence and transparency - works and should remain.

Behind the scenes, Mr Garrett, his state counterparts and various experts and bureaucrats have been crunching the Gonski numbers.

Importantly, Gonski calls for all schools to be funded in the same way, with private schools receiving a percentage of the full Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) amount according to their ability to raise funds from fees and other income.

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