So what exactly is the SRS?
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 127 No 5, 19 July 2024, page 14.
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 needs to meet the needs of its students. That resource standard is called the schooling resource standard (SRS).
But more than a decade after it was agreed upon, governments have failed to deliver the full SRS to state schools, leaving 98 per cent of them resourced below it. In fact, governments have attempted to recast the SRS as an aspirational target, rather than the minimum funding it was established as.
The SRS is not an aspirational standard of school funding, nor is it a desirable level of funding that would give schools an ideal pool of resources. The SRS was designed as the minimum funding required if at least 80 per cent of a school’s students are to achieve learning outcomes above the national minimum standard.
What is the SRS?
The SRS funding mechanism was proposed by the 2011 Gonski Review as a transparent standard for funding all schools based on the needs of their students. Gonski designed the SRS as the minimum required funding per student to give every child, regardless of background, the opportunity to achieve their potential.
It is a base funding amount per student, supplemented by additional needs-based loadings targeted to address disadvantage.
The base amount is based on the SRS funding amounts, the result of analysis of funding levels in schools where at least 80 per cent of students achieved above the national minimum standard in NAPLAN for reading and numeracy for three years in a row. The SRS funding amounts are indexed annually to address any increases to wages and prices.
The SRS loadings provide additional funding for student priority cohorts and disadvantaged schools. A school’s SRS can include up to four student-based loadings and 2 school-based loadings. Loadings are calculated on the basis of how much extra funding is required to help students in the priority cohorts achieve their full potential.
The four student-based loadings are for:
- students with disability
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
- socio-educational disadvantage
- low-English proficiency.
A student may attract funding under more than one loading.
The two school-based loadings are for:
- school size
- school location.
The department calculates the loadings for each school each year.
What went wrong?
In 2017, the Morrison government capped the Commonwealth share of state school funding to 20 per cent of the SRS. In 2018, all jurisdictions signed bilateral school funding agreements with the Commonwealth that required most states and territories to reach only 75 per cent of the SRS.
These actions limited state school funding to a maximum of 95 per cent of the SRS. That means that, on average, every state school student is missing out on around $2,000 of funding every year.
In 2023, state school students across Australia received at least $4.5 billion less than was required to meet the SRS minimum funding amount.
The bilateral funding agreements also allowed state and territory governments to include costs unrelated to schooling in their SRS contributions. These include capital depreciation, the cost of running regulatory bodies, such as teacher registration authorities, and in some cases school transport and early childhood education. This deprived state schools of another $2.1 billion a year.
All governments must work together to fix the funding shortfall. We need to see:
- new funding agreements guaranteeing that all state schools will reach at least 100 per cent of the SRS by 2028
- commitment to a minimum 25 per cent Commonwealth share of the SRS by 2028
- expenses unrelated to education provision, such as capital depreciation, not counted toward the funding share.