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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2008-04-01 Daily Xml
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EDUCATION, SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS FUNDING MODEL

Mr PISONI (Unley) (17:18): Our federal education minister (Hon. Julia Gillard) has missed the point of the SocioEconomic Status (SES) funding model by planning to apply it to public schools in the same way as it has been previously applied to non-government schools. The system itself was successful under the previous government by encouraging significant investment into education and the growth of low-fee schools giving parents more choice. The SocioEconomic Status Index is the basis for federal funding of independent and Catholic schools. It links students' residential addresses to census data to obtain a profile of the school community and its ability to support financially a particular private school.

However, while the SES model has previously assisted in giving parents educational choice (and to a certain extent brought down some of the financial barriers), it was never designed to be applied across the board to address the imbalance in educational disadvantage. It was designed to give choice of education across a broader section of the community, which it was very successful in doing. I am not sure that I would agree that identifying schools requiring extra assistance is important. It is vital that every child be given the best possible chance in life through adequate education funding for public, independent and Catholic schools. However, the federal minister's reluctance to commit on the issue of extra funding as opposed to a redistribution of funds from areas perceived as being socioeconomically privileged in her model compared to those shown as less socioeconomically privileged is of concern.

Julia Gillard has referred to targeting those doing it tough in the Australian community, but this can be subjective, and in terms of education, as in most other things, it is not always postcode specific. For example, in my electorate of Unley, we have pockets and spatterings of Housing Trust and Aboriginal housing. We have many renters in the area and a number of our students at our public schools are on School Card. South Australian primary schools have already suffered major federal funding cuts with Kevin Rudd axing the Investing In Our Schools Program, and at a state level with significant reductions in physical education funding—that is, $14 million of reductions in physical education funding—and a renaming of the cut-price Premier's Be Active Challenge.

Dilapidated school facilities are an obvious and growing problem in South Australia and the new superschools will absorb a large amount of available funding. This will reflect in schools not involved in the superschools program, many of which are located in areas of Adelaide regarded as having a higher socioeconomic status. Educational disadvantage is reflected in low literacy and numeracy outcomes, not postcodes or socioeconomic status. Parents who choose (as I do) to send their kids to public schools deserve to know that minister Gillard's plans will not adversely affect the funding allocated to their education based on some misguided social engineering notion.

A sociological approach to educational disadvantage is flawed logically. Obviously many children will be suffering from different forms of educational disadvantage who do not live in poorer areas. Learning problems, substandard teaching and unstable home lives are not held in a monopoly by less affluent suburbs and can affect children's performance anywhere. Socioeconomic status is only one aspect of educational disadvantage. Testing of students at key stages of their educational process with programs to address the needs of disadvantage at an individual level is a way of tackling the educational disadvantage.

That is why the previous government introduced national benchmarks in literacy and numeracy and programs targeted at individual students such as the tutorial voucher initiative. These apply no matter where the student lives and evaluation of it has found that providing this one-to-one tuition is a most effective way of improving students' reading skills. It also found that the majority of students who received tuition improved their reading scores, with most of them improving their reading age by around 12 months. Parents and tutors were also impressed with the pilot program results.

It would not be fair or equitable to expect parents with children at public schools of high socioeconomic postcodes to plug the program funding gaps with higher fees. Providing this funding for schools is important and should not be at the expense of children at any other school. I have written to minister Gillard seeking her assurance that category six and seven schools such as many of those in Adelaide's eastern suburbs and my electorate of Unley will not be penalised because of the notional views of socioeconomic status.

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