Gonski benefit for schools

ONE line in the Gonski Review of education funding could mean a massive boost in the amount of money given by the government to Jewish schools.

The review, aimed at revolutionising the way schools are funded in Australia, recommended that funding for students with a disability should be “fully publicly funded and applied equally to students in all schooling sectors”.

“For decades, the Jewish day schools have had to manage the support for students with a disability by imposing additional costs on parents or fundraising,” Roy Steinman, Leibler Yavneh College principal and Association of Principals of Jewish Days Schools chairman in Melbourne, said.

Government schools currently receive up to 10 times more money than non-government schools for

students with a disability. For example, if a student has severe physical or intellectual disabilities and they attend a public school then more than $35,000 additional funding is allocated to that school, but Jewish schools would receive less than $4000 for the same student.

As a result, the total cost of students with disabilities to Jewish schools across Australia is more than $1 million annually on top of the regular costs of running the schools.

“This recommendation puts us in a completely different arena, however there is long way to go because there is a considerable amount of disagreement between the states in terms of what is a disability,” Steinman said.

Although the government hasn’t committed to implementing any of the recommendations in the Gonski Review, Minister Assisting for School Education Brendan O’Connor flagged last week that the government would take up this issue. “In school education, there have been valiant efforts to dedicate support for students with disability, but I am not sure we have got it right,” he said. “‘There is very uneven application of funding, little transparency and great variation between the way people are funded in one jurisdiction compared to another.”

According to research commissioned by the Gonski Review the number of students with disabilities in Australia rose 18 per cent between 2005 to nearly 160,000 in 2008.

Australian Council of Jewish Schools executive director Len Hain welcomed the report but said: “We still need to see the fine print.”

“There is significant work to be undertaken to establish indices, loadings, benchmarks and a base value for a school resource standard and the exact impact on the new funding model on our schools will not be clear until this process is completed,” Hain said.

JOSHUA LEVI