Defending Public Education

Helen at Road to Surfdom does an excellent job analysing some of the blatently political high jinks that drive the current Australian Government's education funding. Although children's education is predominantly the responsibility of the states, almost seventy percent of national funding goes to the private sector. Some of the richest schools and wealthy parochial institutions are being subsidised heavily by public money.

Based upon my own experience, public schools are being starved of resources, infrastructure spending is being curtailed and morale within the teaching profession is low.

In Victoria, private schools have seen a massive increase in federal funding, which was pushed politically as a means of increasing access to these schools by aspirational families. In reality as funding has gone up by up to ten times as much as funding for public schools, fees continue to rise. It is like funding a voracious animal.

Here in South Australia, the new state budget proposes to pass on costs of workers compensation to individual schools without an increase in budget. For our little primary school, this will reduce the schools budget by over $20,000 and directly impact some of the value added teaching services. We will be going to State Parliament next week to protest.

It just doesn't seem to stack up with the Australian tradition of a fair go.