SOMEWHERE in all the rhetoric of Gonski, the essential and underlying elements of the schools funding model are being lost. Our kids. Their education. Their futures in what we’ve all too often referred to as the “lucky country”.
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Malcolm Turnbull nowadays prefers to describe us as living in an age that’s never been more exciting. An age of innovation. So let’s look at the political argument and the debate now clouding what most educationists and too many parents of school-aged kids saw as a golden age if Gonski ruled.
Budgets aside, there has to be some way of funding Gonski for the good of our kids that will flow to their kids and our world ahead.
State Education Minister Adrian Piccoli has been a vocal supporter of the Gonski model and the initial backing of the federal government – his own side of the party fence – for it to continue. The fact the funding’s been jettisoned and there’s no funding from them for the last two years of the six-year term has been widely condemned.
The fact Bill Shorten put the funding promise back on the table yesterday makes it a whole new deal and an election battleground.
Mr Piccoli’s response yesterday is something most parents of school-aged children would back.
He said, just two years into the six-year Gonski agreement, NSW schools were seeing the results of the additional funding, including our own Hillvue primary school in South Tamworth.
Mr Piccoli reckons individual schools are seeing big benefits from Gonski – and Hillvue is “a great example up in Tamworth”.
According to the minister, Hillvue received a significant increase in funding, thanks to the Gonski money ... and the school’s individual NAPLAN results are fantastic.
He told media 60 per cent of all Year 3 students there were in the top three bands, compared to a couple of years ago when there was less than 10 per cent.
By anyone’s reasoning – and especially a parent’s – that’s a huge shift.
It’s also the proof in the pudding – and that’s a sticking point for many, not least the political faithful.
But as Susan Armstead, from the Tamworth office of the NSW Teachers Federation, told us yesterday, education policy should have bipartisan support.
Like her, we reject the claim we can’t afford it. We have to. It’s not a cost. It’s an investment in our kids and our country.