Challenging inequality in Australian schools: Gonski and beyond

Abstract

In this paper I look at the most recent policy attempt to address the intractable issue of inequality in Australian schools, the Review of Funding for Schooling Final Report (2011), colloquially known as the ‘Gonski Report’, or simply ‘Gonski’. I highlight its important insights and some of its analytical limitations. I show how a fixation on sector-by-sector (government, Catholic and independent) analysis and disputation distracts from layers of disadvantage and advantage across all sectors, while also acknowledging that there is a disproportionate concentration of disadvantage in the government sector which must thus be properly funded. I illustrate how socio-educational advantage (SEA) and disadvantage are compounded and how the social segregation between schools on the top and bottom rungs is manifest and with associated problems. As implied throughout, systemic relational analysis, which recognises that educational advantage and disadvantage are mutually constituted is a diagnostic necessity which is absent in the Gonski Report and which thus led it to focus on disadvantaged schools rather than on the systemic relationships that also contribute to disadvantage. It is thus rather timid in its recommendations. Even so, I argue, it deserves support because the problems it identifies and seeks to address are dire.

Keywords:

• funding policy
• private schools
• public schools
• social segregation
• Gonski Report

Acknowledgements

I thank Lindsay Fitzclarence and Sue Willis for helping me to think through the ideas in this paper.

Notes

1.ICSEA has gone through two iterations. The first iteration, which was used on the My School website throughout 2010 attracted many criticisms. It was based mainly on Census Collection Districts and the socio-economic status of the school's neighbourhood and Preston explains suffered from the ‘ecological fallacy’. The ICSEA index now in use is based on data about students’ parents’ education and occupation (Preston, 2011, p. 6).

2.My current research is Elite independent schools in globalising circumstances: A multi-sited global ethnography (2010–2014), funded by the Australian Research Council (DP1093778), Monash, Melbourne, Cardiff and Illinois Universities and the National Institute of Education of Singapore. The team consists of Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey (Monash), Fazal Rizvi (Melbourne), Cameron McCarthy (Illinois), Debbie Epstein (Cardiff) and Aaron Koh (HKI) and Ph.D. students; Matthew Shaw, Howard Prosser (Monash) and Mousumi Mukherjee (Melbourne). None of the schools mentioned in this paper are part of this project.

3.For an explanation see ACARA, 2012a.

4.This consulting group, consisting of corporate, government and academic thinkers, provided one of the reports commissioned by Gonski.

5.See http://www.etoncollege.com/summaryofpublicbenefit.aspx

6.A limitation of the On Track Survey is that, as it is a survey and as not everyone responds to it, it is less accurate.

7.Geelong College: http://www.geelongcollege.vic.edu.au/OurCollege/Facilities.aspx; Geelong Grammar: http://www.ggs.vic.edu.au/