CRoSR update
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 129 No 2, 28 March 2024, page 19.
To create a strong and agile state school system that meets every child’s educational needs, urgent investment through a needs-based model is essential, alongside the recalibration of competing system priorities that negatively impact on the wellbeing and workload of the teaching profession.
As the work of the Comprehensive Review of School Resourcing gathers pace in its final year, there is an increasingly emotive public conversation around school funding, and with good foundation. Successive years of underfunding at both a state and federal level are having a huge impact on our schools and on the profession in general.
The first year of the CRoSR project was primarily focused on understanding the financial resources within the system and how they are currently allocated. A seven-month progressive statewide consultation with QTU members resulted in the redefining of our original submission to the department, with four key lanes of feedback around school resourcing needs:
- investing in 21st Century educational expectations
- investing in clarity and equity
- investing in engagement and wellbeing
- investing in our workforce.
You can find out more on the CRoSR webpage via https://www.qtu.asn.au/crosr
2024 heralds a new phase of the work. Intensive stakeholder feedback from all members of the resourcing review reference group has led to the development of a draft preferred model of resourcing.
But how will this new model be funded? Our collective advocacy is squarely focused on achieving additional resourcing. Across Australia, teachers and education support staff in state schools are giving 100 per cent for their students. But they need to be backed by governments with the resources needed to provide high-quality teaching and learning.
The needs-based funding system agreed to by the Commonwealth and state and territory governments uses a resource standard to determine how much money a school or school system requires to meet the needs of its students.
That resource standard is called the schooling resource standard (SRS). But a decade after it was agreed upon, governments have failed to deliver the full SRS to public schools, leaving 98 per cent of public schools resourced below it, while 98 per cent of private schools are resourced at or above it.
Right now, only 1.3 per cent of state schools are at 100 per cent of the schooling resource standard (SRS), the minimum funding level. Fixing this is urgent and is the only way to ensure every child has the support they need to succeed.
This year the Albanese government is negotiating new school funding agreements with each state and territory. Through the AEU’s For Every Child campaign, we are fighting to make sure that these agreements deliver full funding for state schools, because it’s the best investment that Australia can make for the future of public education.
Additionally, we have embedded the QTU CRoSR recommendations in our QTU State Budget Submission and are currently developing our enterprise bargaining interests. We need to see some short, medium, and long-term resourcing and system reform outcomes if we are to redress historic funding inadequacy.
How can you support this work? Firstly, facilitate informed conversations at your workplace around the resourcing needs of your school, and send the feedback through to schoolresourcingreview@qtu.asn.au or via the survey link on our CRoSR page.
Secondly, use our strong democratic processes to form EB recommendations from your branch meetings to inform our work on the QTU enterprise bargaining campaign.