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There is widespread confusion and anger among Queensland private and Catholic schools about how big a hit they will be forced to take in the latest education funding shakeup.
Key points:
- Queensland Education Minister Kate Jones says state school funding deal is an improvement
- But Ms Jones says state funding is still down $300 million on original coalition promise
- Private schools and parents confused about potential cuts
While State Government schools will receive an additional $542 million in funding over the next four years, the overhaul will see some private schools lose money.
Queensland Education Minister Kate Jones said she believed at least two elite schools were among about 24 across the country that would have their funding cut — Hillbrook Anglican School at Enoggera and Cannon Hill Anglican College.
Announcing the changes yesterday, Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said "every one, every student, every school is treated fairly and equitably" and more than 9,000 schools would be better off under the re-branded Gonski 2.0
Ms Jones said the Federal Government last year slashed its original deal by $3.2 billion, but that has now been revised to a cut of $300 million on the original offer.
"This is a significant improvement on the original cuts proposed by the Turnbull Government. But it is still not a better deal than the current deal that we've had in place now for four years," she said.
But Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham but said Queensland state schools would still get significant increases.
"I realise people are talking about, well this isn't as good in some ways as the special deal we had previously compared with the special deal that somebody else had previously," he said.
"Malcolm Turnbull and I aren't interested in special deals. We're interested in making sure we fix a broken school funding system."
Catholic school parents worried about fees
Catholic Schools Parents and Friends spokesperson Carmel Nash said it could not be equitable when Catholic schools were set to get the smallest slice of the pie.
"I am surprised and a bit anxious I suppose, as there was no real detail, and as usual in these announcements the devil is in the detail," she said.
"We have not been spoken to, so we are at a loss to know is happening."
Charmaine Stevens, who sends her children to a Catholic school, is worried about potential increases to fees.
"It is a bit gut wrenching we really make sacrifices as parents to send our children to a good Catholic school," she said.
"It is all about budgeting and we would need to make decisions about the future of our children's education. We crunch numbers every day still have a few years left so every bit of an increase counts."
Model is flawed: Anglican principal
Hillbrook Anglican School principal Geoff Newton said the school had 720 students and charged an average of $11,000 per student annually.
He told ABC Radio Brisbane he had not received any formal notification about changes to funding but believed the school would face a cut.
"I understand from historical conversations in the press and so on, that we will be either frozen or lose funding for the next four years," he said.
"We were kind of expecting a freeze ... but if it is a cut, that is a whole new ball game.
"Statistically you could argue that the model is a little flawed."
Mr Newton said the funding cut could impact the school's fee structure.
"It will mean a lot. We will have to look at maintaining what we started with and that's the moderate fee paying school and we try to be inclusive to all parents," he said.
Mr Newton believes parents will not see any cut to the school's funding as "reasonable".
Private schools save taxpayer money: principal
Another independent school crunching the numbers under the near deal is Kimberley College at Logan.
Principal Paul Thomas said the school charged about $4,000 per student, but receives about $6,000 per student in funding from the State and Federal governments.
"I am not greeting it with joy," he said.
"Because when the Gonski proposals were around we got approximations ... and we were pretty well lowly funded.
"We weren't going to get much per pupil, nowhere near the state level.
"I'm not whining about us not being at state level ... but I don't know much we would benefit from it, maybe not much at all."
Mr Thomas argues his school actually saves taxpayers money.
"If we closed down tomorrow and that state had to take over it would cost them an extra $4 million a year," he said.
"We've had to physically build the school. The latest building we put up cost $2.7 million and all of that came from our savings."
Full details will be released in next week's budget.
Topics: education-industry, access-to-education, educational-resources, federal-government, state-parliament, federal---state-issues, qld, brisbane-4000
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