At Rosemeadow Public School in Sydney's south-west, 30 per cent of students start school without knowing how to hold a pencil. The same number struggle with speech impediments and some share their drawings with family members in a jail cell.

Over the past two years, increased funding has seen the school gain occupational and speech therapists to give struggling students basic skills, launch fishing trips to reach out to parents who would never otherwise step foot inside school gates and support staff with professional development, 60 per cent of whom are in their first years of teaching.

Rosemeadow Public School principal Paul Hughes. Photo: Peter Rae

"It was like being able tread water without being able to swim, now we've got a power boat," says principal Paul Hughes.

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"Seventy per cent of our kids now aspire to go to university," the principal of 17 years says from the school's office in the marginal seat of Macarthur.

"Ten years ago, that figure wouldn't have even been half that. That shows me that our community is changing, they are getting pathways now that supports their capacity to achieve."

Penrith mother of nine, Anna Cook. Photo: Peter Rae

It is a story that is repeated across greater Sydney's marginal seats where schools have enjoyed two years of needs-based funding boosts.

Katoomba High, in Macquarie (Liberal, margin 4.5%), with a large Indigenous student population, got $120,000 in extra funding in 2015 and employed additional literacy and numeracy staff, offered one-on-one mentoring to HSC students and hired a full-time Aboriginal community liaison officer.

Penshurst Public School, in Banks (Liberal, margin 2.6%), with four in five students from non-English-speaking backgrounds, got about $110,000 over 2014 and 2015 in additional funding, which was used to provide individual support for those students and teacher training in literacy.

So it's no surprise that Labor's campaign centrepiece, education policy, plays well in the key seats in Western Sydney where federal elections are won and lost.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has put a relentless focus on education – especially schools – during the first week of the campaign, fronting at schools with new education announceables every day. Labor is betting this pitch plays well with a broad constituency: when you add up teachers, school kids and their extended families – "probably half the population has a deep personal interest in school education", says Peter Goss, from the Grattan Institute.

And in the absence of focus on the interests of small business or real estate investors, an emphasis on education is a positive, emotional appeal Labor can make to aspirational voters, who may not have enjoyed a good education but want better for their children.

But does Labor's education push play well enough in those key seats to win it the election?

A 'vote-changer'

The education union has been laying the groundwork for this election for a long time. A year ago the AEU installed local co-ordinators in marginal Western Sydney seats to run grassroots campaigns – street stalls, school visits, P&C meetings – rallying support for Gonski funding, building networks of principals, parents and teachers whose political antennae could be trained on education policy. ReachTEL polling commissioned by the NSW Teachers Federation last month showed a majority of voters (between 52 and 58 per cent) in Macquarie, Lindsay and four other marginal seats support Gonski-style funding for schools.

"Parents have told us this issue is a vote-changer," says AEU federal president Correna Haythorpe. "They see the difference Gonski funding is making and they understand the choice between the major parties. Under Labor a school can build on what it has done so far and do more for their child such as cut class sizes or improve literacy and numeracy teaching. Under the Coalition their child will not get the benefits of additional resourcing."

If the Coalition loses 13 seats, it will lose its governing majority. Labor needs 19 to win government. Of the government's 20 most vulnerable seats on margins of less than 5 per cent, more than half are in NSW. And schools are under population growth pressure in those seats.

A Fairfax analysis reveals six marginal seats in NSW that have borne the brunt of the state's student boom, recording more than 5 per cent growth in the four years since 2012: Parramatta (Labor), Reid (Coalition), Lindsay (Coalition), Greenway (Labor), Kingsford-Smith (Labor) and Banks (Coalition).

In the marginal Labor seat of Parramatta, held by just 1 per cent, student numbers have ballooned more than 12 per cent – 3.5 times the state average. In the marginal Coalition seats of Reid and Lindsay, enrolments have swelled by nearly 9 per cent since 2012.

Many public schools are overcrowded and perpetually under-resourced. And many have large student populations from non-English-speaking or economically disadvantaged backgrounds, meaning they would attract higher funding injections under the Gonski model.

"For Labor it's a piece of public policy presented as election-winning policy, possibly the key policy differentiating itself from the government. But I'm not sure whether as pure politicking that works," says political historian Dr David Burchell from Western Sydney University.

"Education could be a winner but I don't see it unless you've got the economic credibility to persuade the electorate you are actually going to do what you say."

Opposition education spokeswoman Kate Ellis says "Labor will complete the Gonski reforms – which originated from the biggest ever review of Australia's education system and identified a co-ordinated strategy to closing the gaps in achievement between states and territories ... Properly funding our schools is part of it, but it's equally about ensuring resources are targeted to programs and initiatives that we know make a difference."

Asked how Labor would ensure accountability and better outcomes from its enormous funding commitment, Ellis said "Labor's investment will be tied to evidence-based programs that are proven to lift student results. This includes improving teaching quality through programs like Targeted Teaching, making sure all STEM teachers are qualified in their subjects and lifting year 12 completion rates."

The education electorate

At the centre of all the contestable electorates lies Lindsay on Sydney's western edge, a bellwether seat, won by government of the day since its formation in 1984. It was here that just over three years ago on the pitch of Penrith Panthers stadium that former prime minister Tony Abbott promised "no more cuts to education".

A year later he backflipped, withdrawing from the final two years of Gonski funding, sparking the Gonski battle that has played out among teachers, parents and state and federal governments ever since. With voters already dubious about the Coalition's commitment to education, Turnbull's ill-conceived thought bubble in March about the federal government withdrawing altogether from state schools funding didn't help.

In Lindsay, the median female is a 34-year-old mother of two. At 3:30pm on Thursday it seems most of them are swarming around Penrith's shopping centre.

Among them is 66-year-old Anna Cook, mother of nine, whose youngest has just finished his honours degree. She hopes many of the area's unemployed youth can follow in his footsteps. 

"We need funding," she says. "The schools that we have got are adequate but they are not the best, they all need fixing up, classrooms are overcrowded, I hear of 30 kids to a class and that's just too much for one teacher to handle."

Lindsay's sitting member, Liberal Fiona Scott, said the government was focused not just on more money but on ensuring money is invested where it can make the most difference to student results.

Her opponent is Labor's Emma Husar, a former teacher and mother of three who came to public life when she found her autistic son was not getting the support he needed.

"Parent, teacher, and special needs mum – there is the trifecta for Gonski funding really," she says, sandwiched between tables full of the area's ever-growing teenage population.

"One of the reasons I didn't continue with teaching was because there was no money, no resources in the system, it never felt like you were going to achieve anything. You were just marking time for some of these kids, and unless you have the money and resources to do something with them, it makes teaching very very difficult.

"We've got a young population that wants to access education. We've door-knocked right across the electorate and overwhelmingly that is the issue that comes to mind when we talk to them."

But Western Sydney University's Burchell is not convinced Labor's education campaign will do any more than rally the base.

"There's two potential ways for a voter to look at it ... They might think their kid's school is underfunded, they might think this is something we should be spending more on. But they also don't want to pay more taxes, and worry about deficit and public debt. And Labor will have to deal with questions about whether it's fully funded. 'Can we rely on you to do this?'

"Anecdotally, the people most excited about this issue are core Labor voters. The state school teachers are probably Labor's single most dedicated base [now] … So my instinct would be that Labor's campaign will be great at solidifying the base and maybe ... to win back some of their losses from last time round, if not at actually winning government."

Could lower funding win the election?

The government seems to back Burchell's argument – that Labor might look good on education but that won't be enough to win the election – having apparently conceded education-focused voters to Labor.

"For voters who think that more money is the answer, then the Labor party will perhaps be their preferred choice," Education Minister Simon Birmingham says, "but for voters who think that focusing on the basics in schools, elevating ambition around STEM subjects and rewarding our best teachers are the answers, then they naturally will find the Coalition has better policies."

If you think that doesn't sound all that different from Ellis and Labor's rhetoric, you're probably right. It's clear that Labor's sustained pressure has shifted the Coalition's rhetoric towards needs-based funding and evidence-based programs, even if it won't commit to the "full Gonski".

The minister moved before the budget to dump the planned deregulation of university fees and promise $1.2 billion in additional schools funding over three years (compared with Labor's $4.5 billion over two) in a move seen as an attempt to neutralise Labor's attack on that ground. The Coalition has been scathing over Shorten's claims that Labor's education policy will boost economic growth in a comparable way to the benefits they claim for their company tax cut. But Birmingham is happy to fight Labor on education policy detail.

"I think we're being incredibly transparent about school funding," he says. "In this election people should take comfort from the very open and direct approach that Malcolm Turnbull and I have taken to school funding, which is to honestly say that we don't believe the nation can afford the promises Labor is making, and to have outlined what we think is a generous but affordable trajectory of growth in school funding over the budget forward estimates."

"The data is very clear … Australia has been spending increasing sums of money on school education for many years and yet our results have been going backwards. So ... we think that it's essential that we now leverage that investment to get real reform and improved outcomes in schools, because it's quite clear that how we use the record levels of funding is more important than how much more gets tipped in."

Education analyst Goss from the Grattan Institute says the best approach would be to improve student performance by redirecting existing funds to where they're most needed. But that's a fight with the wealthier independent schools that no political party wants to pick.

"Given the state of the budget, the economically responsible approach is to make some hard trade-offs to ensure the existing school education budget is spent as well as possible," Goss says. "This means shifting money from places or programs where it is wasted to places to where it would make a big difference.

"The toughest decisions are at the level of school funding. It is very clear that some schools should get less government funding; others need more. Neither major party has shown the political courage to take on that issue."

With Inga Ting