A sad joke

The conditions at one inner-city Melbourne high school highlight the absurd level of under-resourcing of state schools around the nation

An edited version of this piece was originally published by The Age on 28 March.

The Victorian education department announced late last year that the entire Year 9 cohort of University High School was going to be moved into a new “campus” in the Melbourne CBD. This “safe and fit for purpose environment” would provide an “outstanding, standalone city based educational experience”, one whose classrooms would be “filled with natural light through floor to ceiling windows with city views”. It sounded magnificent.

This “campus” is actually the 6^th and 7^th floor of an office building in Lonsdale Street, and it has no open-air spaces, no canteen, no windows that open. It is just two floors of office space, divided into fluorescent-lit classrooms, some of which don’t have external windows. The “library” is a small shelf of books and nowhere to sit. The “music” classroom has a single electronic keyboard. There are no Bunsen burners or other built-in equipment in the science rooms. There is no PA system, no school bell, no lockers large enough for school bags. The “recreation” spaces (indoor of course) don’t allow for physical recreation – they’re too crowded. The nearest safe public outdoor space is three city blocks away. You don’t need to be a supporter of state-funded education to find this situation absurd.

The department is “continuing to explore longer-term options for additional secondary school facilities”, which we can take as an admission that the current arrangement is lacking. But it has since refused to answer detailed questions about how this was ever considered a feasible solution for more than 300 fourteen and fifteen-year-old kids. How did it get to this?

The short version is that University High has become very crowded, being the only state secondary school in a massive catchment that includes North Melbourne, Parkville, the Docklands, the CBD, West Melbourne and much of Carlton. They have simply run out of space. At first glance, this sounds reasonable. Of course they ran out of space. But the real issue is the degradation of the entire public school system and the complete lack of planning.

The problem’s not confined to this catchment, or state, either. “The growth we’re now witnessing in inner Melbourne and Sydney is the result of a ‘mini’ baby boom that occurred around 2006,” wrote a Grattan Institute report in 2016. “As night follows day, primary school children become secondary school children, so from 2018 onwards we know that secondary schools in those areas will become increasingly crowded unless new schools come online.” This is exactly what has come to pass. But while the feeder schools to Uni High have become over-populated in the past decade – clear to everyone involved in the local primary schools – no new secondary schools were established.

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The Year 9 students aren’t able to go outside at recess time. There’s not enough time to get to the closest park and back, so they are stuck in the rooms and corridors on the 6^th floor. If kids want to go outside at lunchtime, they need to be signed out, and are issued very uncool fluorescent vests to wear at all times. Their trek to the park must be accompanied by teachers, and staffing constraints mean that a maximum of one hundred students can go each day. The majority of the kids spend both recess and lunchtime in the same airless spaces that they spend the rest of the school day. God help their teachers in the afternoon.

A report released by the Australian Education Union in February revealed that just 1.3% of Australian public schools are adequately funded. Whereas 98% of private schools are over-funded, according to the same broadly accepted Schooling Resource Standard (SRS).

The over-funding of private schools began, unsurprisingly, in the Howard era. In response, the Rudd Labor government in 2010 announced the Gonski review with the aim of reducing social disadvantage in educational outcomes and ending the growing inequities in government funding. The landmark 2012 Gonski report recommended that governments reduce payments to overfunded schools, and redirect funds according to a needs-based model: the Schooling Resource Standard.

Unfortunately governments from Gillard onwards failed to deliver, refusing to pull funding from private and independent schools, or to find the budgets to fund public schools properly (with the states). In fact, the inequality gap widened in the decade following the Gonski report: total state and federal funding for private schools grew at almost twice the rate for public schools.

In the years since the Gonski review, an entire cohort of state school students have gone from kindergarten to Year 12 without receiving adequate funding and resources. The underfunding of public schools across the nation is set to continue until at least 2034.

The federal government currently funds 20% of the SRS for public schools, leaving the remaining 80% up to the states and territories. These proportions are flipped for non-government (Catholic and independent) school sectors: the federal government provides 80% of their SRS funding, with 20% from the states and territories.

Apart from the ACT, no state or territory is currently providing their full 80% for public schools, and there is no legislative body and or law holding them accountable. So in fact most states only contribute 75%, hence the shortfall across the nation. According to the Australian Education Union’s report, this shortfall amounts to $6.5 billion per year. (For context, the federal government spends around twice this amount on fossil fuel subsidies annually.)

To address this systemic problem, federal education minister Jason Clare has spent the past three years trying to negotiate with the states and territories, and is on the verge of formalising a new nationwide agreement (only Queensland is now holding out). In return for some new concessions by the states, the federal government has agreed to raise its contribution to their public school systems to the 25 per cent that would represent adequate funding. The catch: By 2034. That’s three governments away, assuming each one holds the line that Clare has laid out. How likely is this?

In the meantime, state schools will fall billions of dollars further behind.

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Parents were recently invited to see the new Lonsdale Street “campus” for themselves. At an information session afterwards, the heat started to rise, and it wasn’t just from the poor ventilation. Parents were concerned about the lack of activity their kids were getting. Mothers of rowdy boys described how they used to play ball sports every possible spare moment, but now did none. Some kids weren’t going outside because they didn’t like the vests and roll-calls and slow walk to and from the park. Others wondered how their kids had been allocated to the classrooms without any windows and therefore natural light. Could they go onto the roof of the building? No.

Afterwards, others worried about the cost of public transport that they hadn’t needed before, including the cost of kids going to the main campus, two kilometres away, for after-school activities. How could they participate in lunchtime clubs and bands? Would kids be able to join the school musical? What about the food tech classes? (“No, Michelle.”) There were many, many questions.

The school and especially the hard-working teachers are not to blame. By all reports they are trying valiantly. The problem is state-wide, and nation-wide.

State school parents across Australia have their own stories of ridiculous under-resourcing. Parents fund-raising for soap in their primary schools. Cake-stalls for basic library books. Teachers buying their own books and stationary for their classes. Classrooms not large enough for all students to sit at desks at the same time. Playgrounds so crowded that kids are not allowed to run.

One private school in Melbourne currently boasts a 500-seat auditorium, 30 pianos in its music school, a pipe organ in its secondary hall, another 400-seat drama theatre with rehearsal studios, 4 specialist art studios, a centre for science, a centre of design and technology, a heated pool, diving pool, badminton courts, squash courts, gymnasium and sports hall, 26 tennis courts, 7 ovals, synthetic hockey field, a rowing shed including weights centre, a separate 80 hectare private forest for camping, and a seaside camp.

Surely a breath of fresh air each day isn’t too much to ask.