Page 2304 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 23 June 2010
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Just before I go to those, let me look at the specifics of these particular amendments. I think they do cover, as best we can from this vantage point, the range of issues that were considered in 2006 and, indeed, can be considered in the future. I particularly want to acknowledge that this list now encompasses a range of challenges that confronted the government in 2006.
Most particularly, I draw the Assembly’s attention to the educational impacts, most particularly assessing the range, quality and depth of education programs but also looking at the age and condition of school infrastructure, facilities and resources, teacher resources and workloads, extracurricular activities and then looking at economic impacts such as, of course, the much-argued-about recurrent and capital savings that accrue from a school closure and, importantly, the comparative cost per student to operate a facility now.
Looking into the future and looking at the direction of school funding in Australia and the particular issues that the government confronted in 2006 in relation to higher average cost per student for some of the smaller schools as a result of particular funding structures, I can reasonably confidently say that, with the future direction of education policy being around funding schools rather than funding education systems, the wide disparity of funding that certainly had occurred in the ACT system, where for example—
Mr Doszpot: It had no impact on Tharwa, did it?
MR BARR: If Mr Doszpot would hear me out, for example, in Tharwa, the cost of educating a student in 2006 was somewhere around 2½ times the average cost of educating a student in the average ACT school.
One would presume, if the Liberal Party in the ACT were consistent with the Liberal Party nationally, their preference would be for voucher-style funding systems where a set level of funding is attached to a student and follows that student regardless of the educational institution they attend. Then the prospect for such a level of public subsidy based solely on the number of students in a particular school would no longer apply. The resourcing implications for schools into the future, on one level, will become more acute because the level of public subsidy will not be there, as funding will be more likely to be attached to the student rather than funding a system overall.
That is clearly one direction of education funding policy that would appear to be the path that we are heading down at a national level, subject of course to the outcomes of the review of school funding that the Deputy Prime Minister has commissioned. But it is clear that there will be a greater emphasis certainly on new resources in the education system being targeted at individual students who have particular needs or individual schools, rather than spread into systems.
We will not see some of those issues that were confronted in 2006 being such a great challenge in terms of the equitable distribution of resources within school systems, because the funding models are going to change. That will certainly give greater transparency in terms of where government resources are allocated in the education
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