Michael Furtado: Submission to the Gonski Review on School Funding, March 30, 2011

Prefatory Note: This six-part submission focuses mainly on the situation of the Catholic systems. Implications of the opinions and judgements expressed in it for other school providers are acknowledged and, as far as I am able to ensure, addressed in the text. A bibliography citing evidence for the assertions and arguments contained in the submission is available from my PhD thesis (The University of Queensland, 2001), which is a public document and various other published documents. In all instances my comments are addressed to all members of the Review Panel. I thank them for giving of their time to such a worthy and necessary public service. My contact details are attached to this submission.

Summary: This submission notes the observation of many, such as Professor Judith Sloan, that the Catholic systems continue to negotiate funding arrangements that fall outside the policy consistency of the existing funding model, and as such recommends ways of funding Catholic and similar other schools that corrects this anomaly. In doing this, the submission also responds to the concerns of various Catholic education authorities about dwindling enrolments from low-SES cohorts in Catholic schools by suggesting funding policy changes to reverse this trend and which include the integration of Catholic and similar other non-government schools within a diversified and integrated public education system that allows greater choice of schools without making such a thing dependent on the payment of fees. In this regard, this submission also seeks to ameliorate the concerns of public education advocates and state school providers who frequently complain about the class-residualising effects of extant funding policy and which are often framed in terms of subsidising those who pay fees to opt out of the government and into the non-government school systems. The net effect of such a change will also enable more transparent and fairer comparisons to be drawn between diverse schools that are equally funded, thereby enhancing and furthering Australian school reform policy in regard to enhancing and improving school effects. Finally, this proposal argues that the introduction of greater choice and competition within an integrated public education system will promote not just better results but also greater economy in school provision, inevitably resulting, as a matter of economic necessity, in the closure of schools that fail to attract students. It similarly proposes that those school providers who decline to enter into such an integrated arrangement be disenfranchised of their funding.

I. INTRODUCTION: The history of funding schools in Australia is a long and complex one. This complexity derives from two major factors, the first of which is political in nature, whilst the second has its origin in the technical calculations concerned with the quantum of funds and its allocations. In addition, when we speak of funding, we tend to restrict our comments to recurrent funds (i.e. not including capital funds), and also to focus only on the contributions of the Commonwealth Government (i.e. we ignore the considerably different funds contributed by each State Government.)

The reason for not including capital funds perhaps lies in the fact that the Commonwealth Government’s contribution is small relative to the recurrent funding, and is less directly interventionist in the schooling process than recurrent funding. The reason for not including different levels of State Government funding is less clear, but given the fact that approximately 70 –80% of a schools funding is derived from the two forms of Government, this lack of clarity should not be allowed to continue.

The political history of school funding in Australia has been marked by arguments concerning state-aid to private schools, the objections of the Defence of Government Schools lobby, and some social reforms relating to matters of equity and social justice as expressed in terms of quality outcomes or results of schooling, often measured against international benchmarks. At present Australian schooling has a funding approach that is characterised by contributions from both levels of Government, and in the case of some non-government schools, by the contribution of school fees paid by parents. The relative amounts of funding are usually determined on a quadrennial basis (at Commonwealth Government level) and annually at State Government and parental levels, which also adds to the confusion.

Whilst the calculations of these quanta of funds from the three sources attracts some notice among commentators, inevitably it is the distribution of funds to individual schools and the consequent impact of those funds on the quality of the schooling processes provided by the schools, that attracts the most comment. Current commentators, such Professor Jim McMorrow of the University of Sydney, are concerned about a lack of transparency in both the derivation of the quantum of funds, and in the allocation or distribution of the funds to schools.

The same commentators are also critical of the lack of accountability of funds providers for the reasons underlying their decisions concerning quanta of funds and the methods (or formulae) for the distribution of those funds. A clear example of this latter concern relates to the current SES model of distributing funds, which most commentators see as being so modified or compromised, as to be no longer defensible as a genuine SES model.

In the current context, the Commonwealth Government has executed legislation (in the form of the Schools Assistance Bill, 2008) and COAG has negotiated agreements around Specific Purpose Programs and new National Partnerships, all for the present quadrennium 2009 – 2012. The Commonwealth Government has also signalled that during these four years it intends to develop a new approach to school funding, through the consultative process and reporting of the Gonski Review (and giving rise to this submission) which it hopes will transcend all the divisive aspects of earlier approaches, and which will deliver ‘excellence for every student in every school’ (Julia Gillard MP, Minister for Education, Commonwealth Hansard, May 2008.)

Whatever new approach the Government develops, it must address the twin underlying concerns of every approach as noted earlier: firstly, what is the quantum of funds needed to

achieve the Government’s aim, and where should those funds come from? Secondly, how should those funds be distributed so that every student in every school can achieve excellence?

If the Commonwealth Government’s own criteria for the performance of schools (transparency and accountability) are applied to its decision making with respect to funding the schools, then some obvious questions present themselves:

a) What does ‘excellence for every student in every school’ mean in terms of identifiable

and measurable achievement?

b) What might be an average projected cost for each student to achieve excellence?

c) Which students might need more (or less) funding than the average in order to achieve excellence?

d) What are the best ways to deliver differential funds for needy students?

If the Panel, and through it, various levels of government, researchers and school communities, and especially, in terms of this submission, Catholics schools, could be collectively engaged in answering these questions, then there would be hope that a new, more just and defensible approach to funding schools in Australia could be developed, owned by all and consequently rendered more powerful in the interests of the common good. This new approach would then be future-focussed, open to informed debate, and generative of the common hope that an improved funding model will provide a major impetus for improved schooling in this country. Without detracting from the work and focus of the Gonski Review, it may well require a further research or survey project, similar to Professor Karmel’s Survey of Needs, and based on devising a means of engaging all funding recipients to answer and publish the results from the above questions.

II. THE TRADITIONAL AND ORIGINAL CATHOLIC SCHOOLS FUNDING CONTEXT: The existence of a substantial, vibrant and dissenting Catholic minority has in many senses been the harbinger for Australia’s emergence as a pluralistic and multifarious democracy, in which citizens of dramatically diverse cultural and religious identities have learned to live in peace with and tolerance of one another, especially through their experience of school education.

In this quest Catholic schools have undoubtedly played a major part, providing an alternative narrative to the dominant educational story, where none was initially allowed to exist, especially in terms of diverse ethnicity, religious culture and tradition. What commenced as a beleaguered ouvre came eventually to be accepted as a respectable minority – the largest religious group in the land – and brought with it the kind of changes to school provision that continue to exert a great deal of policy pressure on school funding.

The Catholic population, originally of substantially working-class Anglo-Irish origin, and therefore closely attached to the Labor Party, was now joined by a diversity of Catholics, whose experiences of parties of the Left being largely anti-clerical, cleaved towards a politics that was resolutely anti-communist and conservative. The effect was to complicate an Australian politics, hitherto built on sectarian and class cleavage lines, and hence to split the Labor Party on a range of ideological issues including state-aid, the Iron Curtain and the union movement.

The public rhetoric of BA Santamaria, the highly provocative and effective polemicist behind the substantially Catholic-supported Democratic Labor Party, split the ALP and ensured that it was kept out of power so long as it held to a platform based on class warfare and little else. The split also pigeon-holed and arguably consolidated Catholics as purveyors of a particular kind of confessional politics that had long since been resolved in other comparable OECD polities. It is suggested that elements of this confessional politics still obtain in Australia in relation to Catholic claims on state-aid and that, given the pluralistic democracy that is Australia’s, there might be better ways of ‘doing’ state-aid than at present.

This submission therefore proposes that, just as state and independent schools have their myths, sometimes founded in reality and sometimes not, so also have Catholic schools had to learn the successes and drawbacks of an appeal to a beleaguered and disenfranchised past about state-aid that once might have worked but which now generates diminishing returns. My submission rests on this fundamental observation, viz. that the revisitation of myths can be a discomforting prospect, suggesting a re-examination of a state-aid strategy that once may have worked but which now must be reviewed if it is to have lasting meaning and sustainability in contexts that are subjected to dramatic strain and change in an increasingly globalised world.

III. REPRISING THE MISSION OF CATHOLIC SCHOOLS IN NEW CONTEXTS: Australian Catholic education has shown itself to be remarkably adaptable to new situations and contexts in which its mission and existence are not threatened. Catholic schools responded well during the 80s and early 90s to the Dawkins Reforms, recognising that modern Australia needed a smarter, more adaptable and better-educated workforce for post-industrial times: Catholic secondary schools have long since undertaken as a matter of mission integrity to serve the poor by adjusting their curriculum to increase the number of children completing Year 12 through acquiring vocational and trade qualifications, while simultaneously continuing to provide the more traditional and conservative points of entry to a university education.

This is no mean achievement in a disparate system originally comprising many hundreds of formerly independent schools with niche-market traditions catering to all levels of Australian society and, like other schools well into the 1970s and 80s, generally geared to pursuing an academic curriculum that syphoned off high performers alone, such as at least two distinguished members of your panel, for the glittering prize of a university education. The growth and development of the Catholic systems in this regard, particularly as guided by one of your members, is a lesson to many in striking the right balance between deregulation and regulation during a period in which the comprehensive, one-size-fits-all model seemed the only way to proceed. In retrospect, such a model may have been unsuitable for achieving all the complex expectations of school education in state systems marked mainly for their compliance with state-based ‘education command economies’, and which may not have suited the expectations of many parents in an increasingly diversified economy and society (Giddens, ‘Beyond Left and Right: the Politics of Uncertainty, Polity Press, NY, 1994).  

The very high ‘communitarian’ aspect of Catholic schools, linking parish, home and school, provided an alternative narrative to that of public education that was at once personal and pastoral as well as professional, with a tradition going back many hundreds of years. In some states like Queensland, Catholic schools took the lead in supporting socially innovative and liberal curriculum initiatives, such as by hosting the Teaching for Human Rights Program, the Social Literacy Project, MACOS and SEMP that were proscribed in state schools because of an executive stranglehold on the agencies of public administration, including government schooling.

Indeed, the entire non-government sector in the history of Queensland schools during the Bjelke-Petersen era provides a telling example of the value of subsidiarity and local decision-making at a time when public education was deeply traditional, over-controlled and disrespectful, as in all other aspects of governance in that state, of the principle of the separation of powers. Catholic schools, as elsewhere, also played a major role in the Participation and Equity Program, employing professional development on a major scale to dramatically improve teacher credentials, profiles and professional standards. In Queensland it was the Commonwealth government that provided the funds, initially accessed mainly by non-government schools, to build and utilise the magnificently generous and much-needed resources - human, cultural and material - of the Bardon Professional Development Centre.

The policy focus of the Howard government shifted from curriculum development and improvement in professional standards towards a reconstruction of schooling as accountable to market forces. It did this by using funding as an instrument to reflect as well as drive parental choice, mainly, it is argued here, by bringing government and non-government schools into competition with each other for an increasingly rationalised funding dollar. In this reconfiguration the Catholic systems were caught in the middle, between one side with which it shared much in common by virtue of a mission to pursue education as a public good and the other with which it shared its non-government status (and which is almost unique in the OECD: Catholic schools are mainly public-sector schools in other equivalent other polities).

The subsequent dramatic increase in non-government school enrolments and funding hardly reflected the special circumstances of Catholic schools, disenfranchised for over a century by the cessation of state-aid, and instead used them, it is argued here, through policy flow-on effects from (effectively) Catholic-specific funding dispensatory arrangements, to privilege a new demographic of low-SES non-Catholic schools as well as high SES schools, which, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, charge very high fees that exclude the enrolment of large numbers of low-SES students. It is a matter of fact that in most comparable OECD countries such high-fee/high-SES schools get no state-aid.

The Catholic ‘maintained funding’ school deal with the Coalition was therefore widely regarded as enabling Prime Minister Howard to publicly state that the Catholic schools had agreed to and were part of an SES-based funding-differentiated model, as indeed they were. However, Catholic schools had a privileged status within the new funding arrangement, i.e. not all Catholic schools abided by the formula and therefore received substantially more than they would have if all Catholic schools had been funded strictly according to the formula. This was according to the Catholic condition, readily conceded by the Coalition government and adhered to by the present Labor Government, to accommodate the Catholic position that ‘no school should be worse off financially’. This submission argues against such an arrangement.

IV. DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CATHOLIC ‘NO SCHOOLS WORSE OFF’ POSITION: Firstly, it assumes there will always be more in every quadrennial budget for expenditure on school education. Not many anticipate that when such largesse dries up, the ‘no schools worse off’ condition may not apply and its removal as a central feature of the Catholic schools case will considerably weaken the Catholic school strategy of protecting its own interest while insulating itself from or maintaining a benign neutrality towards funding of other schools.

For those committed to a policy tradition of contingency funding, quadrennial funding agreements, locking-in the Commonwealth to delivering on its promises, could easily be renegotiated, thus privileging a strategy for Catholic school advantage and, by definition, partly opting out of the government policy frame, making the Catholic school funding arrangement a perennially exceptional one.

In other words, at this point in time the arrangement by which Catholic schools are funded and upon which they depend, is out of sync with the logic underpinning government policy, and its logic, both moral and economic, is hard to reconcile within a policy frame that seeks to apportion funding fairly between all schools, whether government or non-government.

My second point is that it would be unjust as well as futile for Catholic schools to oppose or opt out of such a policy frame, so that they would not lose funding in any version of the SES model, which, presumably, was designed to fund all schools equitably. If, therefore, the SES model is a distribution formula, the Gonski Review Panel’s major responsibility must be to ensure that all schools are consulted or otherwise engaged in the determination of an agreed SES-based rationale for funding to be distributed. If not, the SES distribution formula should be abandoned as providing a smokescreen for a farcical arrangement that is honoured more in the breach than in the true spirit of it original differentiated funding intention.

Thirdly, the resulting return to class warfare after a decade of peace has accordingly positioned Catholic schools in a narrow and awkward space between the public and private education sectors, making neutrality impossible and the taking of sides inevitable. Indeed, the culture and structures that optimised the Catholic struggle for state-aid, and arguably extending a substantially Catholic school funding dispensatory arrangement to all other non-government schools, have contributed in my view to this taking of sides, thereby jeopardising Catholic educational identity and mission integrity, which is, first and foremost, to educate low-SES students, who, DEWR statistics demonstrate, have gradually abandoned Catholic schools in large numbers over the years as they have reluctantly been caught up in the divisive effects of the class-based, public-versus-private school debate.

There are therefore pressing reasons for the Panel to consider recommending funding policy changes that will reverse the trend for low-SES students to be disproportionately enrolled in state schools and instead for their numbers to be more widely dispersed across all sectors as a condition of funding policy. I turn now to how Catholic and similar other schools can be induced as part of the review to share this responsibility as a matter of mission integrity, given the availability of equitable material resources to counter the marginalisation of low-SES students in state schools.

V. SUPPORTING THE CATHOLIC SECTOR TO PLAY A BIGGER ROLE IN EDUCATING LOW-SES STUDENTS:

1.By removing Catholic hybridity through either privatisation or integration: Once the strategic objective of a return to state-aid had been achieved, it would have made sense to review and change state-aid conditions to suit new realities, such as through integrating Catholic systemic schools within a broader and more diverse public educational provision, rather than submit to the telling and sustainable criticism by Professor Judith Sloan, among others, of the unacceptability to the non-government sector of special favours meted out to the exceptionally protected and hybridised Australian Catholic schools sector, which includes highly variegated Catholic independent and systemic schools.

In a day and age fast becoming attuned to the dominance of the free market, it is unsustainable as well as irrational to argue a special case for funding Catholic schools, which would then have to accept less funding and raise their fees, concomitant with trends in other non-government schools. For a variety of reasons that are cited in this submission, this scenario appears unlikely to be acceptable to the Catholic Church and is argued here to constitute a retrograde option.

2. By mooting integration within the public sector: Given that the Catholic sector genuinely fears a loss of stability through future quadrennial budget cuts, a feasible option to explore is to integrate the Catholic systems within a diversified, devolved and expanded public sector, thereby undertaking to increase its revenue through arrangements, evident and reasonable under an authentically distributed SES-based funding model, that would increase levels of funding to all schools that enrolled low-SES students (and conversely decrease them to schools that are unable or unwilling to attract such a demographic).

3. By making school funding policy a transparent and open discourse: Since the divisive DOGS debate, Commonwealth governments have gone to great lengths to minimise public debate on schools funding issues, providing, by way of exception, very few opportunities for public discussion and influence on this policy site. In the run-up to the last quadrennium, the Howard Government proceeded to negotiate only with private schools and jettisoned a longstanding policy tradition of opening up the policy process to contributions from all who wished to participate in the democratic process by expressing a written opinion. To the extent that current funding arrangements for non-government schools over the present quadrennium glided through Federal parliament with barely a word of dissent, nor even much public discussion in the media, there has to be a better way of improving funding policy than by ‘burying’ it.

State governments are also highly complicit with the Commonwealth in preferring the continuation of behind-the-scenes policy settlements with the private school lobby over robust public debate (See my essay, ‘Historical Construction and Australian Catholic Education: Some Lessons for School Funding Policy from the Cultural Politics of Australian Education’, Discourse: International Journal of the Cultural Politics of Education, Vol 30, No 2, June 2009, in relation to this). The persistence of such anomalies directly contradicts the experiences of several European nations in which the dissolution of Catholic political parties correlate with the precise moment of resolution of what used to be called ‘the Catholic schools question’.

4. By addressing the reality that high-achieving OECD countries have few if any publicly-funded private schools: The impact of Australia’s divisive, unique and unorthodox school funding model on participation, curriculum, assessment and teacher morale is rarely taken into account in the investigations of the education research community. Yet as Australian government schools effects show signs of their students becoming steadily more residualised, the main initiatives in funded research into problems of low-achievement in some sectors of Australian schooling focus more and more on problems and issues of unproductive pedagogy, rather than on solutions relating to the deep public/private divisions in Australian education, even though OECD school performance data indicate the almost complete absence of a bifurcated, public-versus-private school system in any of the top performing countries.

5. By emphasising the means and gains of build consensus on state-aid: To break this impasse and to move beyond the divisive state-aid debate, I suggest a public settlement on schools funding that aims to bring "private" and "public" schools under one integrated, national/federal funding system or umbrella. This would require major concessions from both sides and will be highly contested, but we need to think seriously about ways to chart a new course. It would also provide an enormous incentive for Catholic systemic and similar other schools to share with state schools the responsibilities and challenges as well as the concomitant funding privileges of educating low-SES learners, thus stemming the flow of low-SES students from Catholic to state schools, as well as for state schools to unburden themselves from some of their responsibilities and sharing them with other providers.

6. By making support for civic pluralism, diversity and difference, thereby driving school choice for all, as a fundamental principle for funding schools: Such a recommendation also reprises Whitlam’s insightful principle of civic pluralism, which, through funding, recognised and funded a diversity of school types according to religion, culture and educational philosophy, because, from evidence, parents categorically demonstrate that they support a diverse educational provision, the right to choose and, by implication, the design of mechanisms and instruments by which to both measure and access the standing of comparable schools in terms of their aggregated standardised test results, such as through the MySchool website.

7. By addressing the need for funding policy coherence with the continued use and refinement of instruments and mechanisms for measuring and publicising comparative school performance: It is impossible not to deduce that the publication of NAPLAN test results on the MySchool website recognises parental rights in this regard, while insisting on submitting data therein to necessary ethical and equity requirements, such as school income disclosure and valid test result comparison as broken down by reference to SES categorisation. The publication of such data also provides an incentive for higher-SES schools, both private and public, to share their cultural capital with students for whom school choice and equal opportunity have hitherto been restricted. A new, more closely co-ordinated and integrated funding policy would, cohering with this comparative school reform measure, explicitly reward Catholic and other non-government schools for more effort in improving school results for supposedly underperforming students and teachers.

8. By recognising the links between poverty, disability and educational exclusion: Given that low-SES figures correlate closely with disability, it is important, in terms of the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act, that schools should not diagnose hidden disability, and as manifested in disruptive classroom behaviour, as a matter of moral education and strict disciplinary treatment, to be cured through behaviourist solutions and by segregating learners into streamed classes and separate schools that specialise in reversing behaviours that are perceived to stray from a prescribed but often unexamined norm. This simply reinforces reproductive practice and assigns learners of difference, often of low-SES background, to diminished life-chances and economic situations exhibiting a high degree of welfare dependency and economic disadvantage.

9. By showing how charging fees particularly disadvantages low-SES learners as well as learners with disabilities:  While it would be a travesty to suggest that Catholic schools deliberately and consciously pursue exclusivist policies, there are aspects relating to a reliance on fees and social differentiation, such as through streaming and specialised schooling, that militate against the equitable treatment of high needs learners in homogeneous school settings. Perhaps the reason for the perpetuation of such practices in some systems resides in the fact that such decisions were once almost exclusively resource-driven, with high-SES schools financially off-setting the costs of low-SES ones, through fees redistribution. Even today Catholic systems commendably ameliorate the separatist and exclusive effects of such a tradition by redistributing their block funding and fees to assist high needs schools.

To some extent the existence of separate Catholic independent and systemic schools, as well as class-differentiated schools within the same congregational tradition (such as the Christian and Marist Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy) still reflects this tradition, although such arrangements may have been driven by practical considerations such as funding: it was thought to be easier and less expensive to stream children according to ability in order to provide economically ‘viable’ classes and this has resulted in many parents withdrawing their children (or being advised in some instances by Catholic schools themselves to do so) in order to avail of better-funded or more appropriate facilities in a nearby state school for learners with high-level needs.

10. By taking a critical view of the relatively low costs of Catholic schooling, because cost-cutting often detracts from inclusive teaching and learning practices:  Such anachronisms should not be accommodated within Catholic schools, which should be financially supported in every way possible to follow their mission to educate the least advantaged. Since recent comparative figures released by the Productivity Commission reveal that the net costs of educating a child in a Catholic school are the lowest of all three sectors, this may well explain why the inclusion of more low-SES enrolments would considerably escalate costs in Catholic schooling, and would not constitute a viable proposition without attending to a dramatic increase in their funding. It follows, therefore, that any funding review should recommend a bigger share of the cake, no matter how small its overall size, for Catholic and similar other non-government schools if they are to meet their inclusive obligations and mission more effectively.

11. By supporting the Catholic Bishops in their quest to make Catholic schools more available to low-SES students:  The Catholic Bishops from various Australian states and territories have tried to redress the loss of low-SES students from Catholic schools through reference to schools making sacrifices, but hitherto to no avail (‘Catholic Schools at a Crossroads’, Pastoral Letter of the Bishops of NSW and the ACT, August 7, 2007). Such well-meaning injunctions, as addressed to Catholic Education Offices that in any case already allocate funds to each school on the basis of need, not only constitute an added burden to existing schools, they also rely on a charitable impulse that clearly does not resonate with low-SES families, who, in this day and age should not have to decide between philanthropic and therefore exceptional or concessional educational arrangements for their children on the one hand, and entitlement/equity/human rights-based school funding, enrolment and curriculum provision, notionally provided within a public education, on the other.

VI. TOWARDS IDENTIFYING AN OVERARCHING FRAMEWORK FOR REFORMING SCHOOL FUNDING POLICY: The Review Panel should therefore provide an opportunity for the resolution of these dilemmas. It might consider doing so in the following ways:

1. Through recommendations in favour of the rationalisation of funding, so that all funding sources and amounts are transparent. The current bifurcated system that allows the Commonwealth to mainly resource non-government schools, while the states predominantly fund government schools should be terminated. This will address the complaints of state school teacher unions that the non-government sector is massively overfunded (and which are based purely on Commonwealth funding) while making both government and non-government schools, as recipients of both federal and state revenues, accountable to one funding source alone.
2. It should link funding with questions privileging individual and group school identity, not simply to encourage diversity of school provision in an integrated school system that might otherwise cave into bland homogeneity, but to encourage all systems to compete for funds rather than emphasise their uniformity with and similarity to other schools. The important questions for all publicly-funded schools should instead be about who attends them, from what SES background, how fair and equitable this is in terms of funding, what should be done about this, and what the implications are in light of this for the mission and identity of the school or cluster of schools.

For example, the contribution of Catholic schools to the broader Australian culture and identity has been immense. In general they have provided a socially liberal bulwark against fundamentalism of all kinds, both secular and religious, infusing a largely unfaithed and areligious mainstream with a sense of spirituality and decency about the shared space that we call Australia, producing citizens who make a major contribution to all walks of life and, generally, helping to create a uniquely Australian fusion between faith and life that the universal Catholic Church has increasingly found it unable to sustain on its own.

In sum: to promote diversity of school provision through an attention to differentiated identity, while controlling for differences that should not matter or which would unfairly advantage one school over another, the Gonski Review Panel might avoid slashing the most essential and basic school services, including more realistic budgets for schools that offer opportunity to the poorest, the disabled and the hardest to teach. Our treatment of these Australians will provide the ultimate and most eloquent measure of the standing and vision of Review Panel members as just, equitable and honourable Australians.

1. The Review Report should endorse the recommendation of Dr Tony Moore, published in The Australian of March 12, 2011, that it makes sense for the Commonwealth government to work towards bringing all school providers together as part of one system. The way to do this is to reprise the set of gaols surrounding the purposes of Australian schooling that provide the only available vision or mission that all Australians might broadly support. Without that, the policy bickering of the past would return.

Indeed, the Prime Minister's response to Gonski will determine whether Labor has the imagination to inaugurate a true education revolution. In this, she and the government should insist on keeping to their broader vision of education as a communitarian enterprise for the future benefit of Australian schooling, instead of a return to a policy of placating narrow sectional interests and playing them off, as in the past, against one another through state-sponsored funding solutions that are manifestly in disarray.

1. Any suggestions of interpreting integration into one overarching system as a take-over by the state of autonomous and highly effective non-government schools, should be couched in the kind of language, policy and practices that would dispose the Coalition parties to support the Gonski recommendations as privileging the devolution and deregulation of state schools, including encouraging the provision of a high degree of diversity, internal independence and autonomy.
2. Instead, and to placate the Labor-Green lobby, the Review Panel might consider constructing those aspects of the submission that argue for the integration of Catholic and similar other schools within the broader context of a diversified and deregulated public education provision, with greater accountability for such schools to improve the performance outcomes of low-SES students by offering such students and their families a choice of schooling that is currently unavailable to them.
3. The Review Panel should specify that such an integrated school policy should attract funding for Catholic and other schools undertaking to meet requirements and accountabilities equivalent to that of state schools, and which are ultimately entirely dependent on widely-agreed and transparent measures of socio-economic need and not on factors irrelevant to such objectives, such as the religious nature and ethos of individual or collective groups of integrated schools. In this regard it would assist Review Panel members to allude to the high degree of success attending the determination of similar terms and conditions for integrated school funding in New Zealand, the various British Isles jurisdictions, and parts of Canada and the Low Countries.
4. The Review Panel should also attach importance to changes in the discourse of the public funding of schools from the provision of a social service to a form of government investment to reward productivity and performativity in school results, while cutting expenditure to schools that decline to comply with such conditions. Schools unprepared to enrol such students would simply attract less state-aid, while those that do would receive more.
5. Finally, for such a proposal to be successful, a recommendation of the need for further research, equivalent to Professor Peter Karmel’s Survey of Needs, should be made and research conducted to reveal the full extent of the hiatus currently facing extant funding policy as a means of building consensus for a new deal. Substantial other research projects should also be identified and endorsed to explore the adaptation of various models of integration to Australian conditions, especially from a constitutional and legal position.

I wish the Review Panel members every success in their deliberations and thank them for considering my submission.

Michael Furtado

Title of PhD Thesis:  ‘Funding Australian Catholic Schools in New Times’ (The University of Queensland, 2001). Former Education Officer (Social Justice), Brisbane Catholic Education; Former Lecturer, Universities of Newcastle and Southern Queensland; Current Hon. Research Advisor, The University of Queensland; Current Partner, Boyce Furtado Education Consultants. Address: 32 Cohoe St, Toowoomba, QLD. 4350; Ph: (07) 4687 7915; Mobile: 0417 708 945

Email address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Website:  www.discoveringdisability.com.au

Michael Furtado - International Refereed Papers

Michael Furtado's recent accepted international refereed papers with web addresses, as well as the text of one of them.

1. Furtado, M. ‘Historical Construction and Australian Catholic Education: Some Lessons for School Funding Policy from the Cultural Politics of Australian Education’, Discourse: International Journal of the Cultural Politics of Education, in press, June 2009

2. Furtado, M. ‘Towards Inclusive Pedagogies: Meanings Emerging in Practice from MUD, SID and RED!’ Refereed paper, Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Brisbane, December 2008

3. Furtado, M. ‘What should be essential in the role, character and provision of public education? What role should private schooling play and what arrangements might support this role? Refereed paper, The 2020 school education summit: The public good and the education of children, Dixson Room, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, June 28th, 2008

4. Furtado, M. 'Some Proposals for Change to the Role of the Catholic Sector in the Australian School Funding Policy Process', The Australian Education Researcher: Journal of the Australian Association for Educational Research, Vol 33, No. 3, December 2006 www.aare.edu.au/aer/online/0603e.pdf

5. Furtado, M. ‘The End of Modernist Approaches to School Funding Policy in Australia: a New Rationale for Funding with Inclusive Implications for All Australian Schools?', International Journal of Inclusive Education, Vol 9, No. 4, October-December 2005 http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.usq.edu.au/ehost/pdf?vid=6&hid=13&sid=bcf8af64-5a92-4a94-ac0f-54b973f529ea%40sessionmgr2

Dr Michael Furtado Radio Interview

Michael was recently interviewed by Stephen Crittenden on Religion Affairs on ABC Radio National. The topic under discussion was Catholic School Funding and the Common Good.

Click on the link below to hear the full interview.