EDUCATION BUDGET NOTHING MORE THAN ‘SMOKE AND MIRRORS’

The Commonwealth’s attempt to sweeten voters by throwing money at education will deliver no real benefits to the majority of students and teachers, Education and Training Minister Rod Welford said.

“The Federal Budget’s education commitments are little more than a series of ‘smoke and mirrors’ designed to give the impression they are addressing the key issues in education, when in fact they represent little more than superficial window dressing,” Mr Welford said.

“Essential educational infrastructure such as teacher training and professional development, system-wide school resources and TAFE funding have gone nowhere under this budget.”

Mr Welford said that while he supported in-principle the “summer school” bonuses for teachers, its impact would be negligible.

“This bonus will secure professional development for only 1000 teachers each year – that’s less than one per cent of all Australian teachers,” he said.

“I have previously called on the Federal Government to make a serious investment of at least $50 million in professional development initiatives, but all they’ve allocated is a miserly $5 million.

“Their literacy and numeracy funding proposals will also do nothing to bolster school resources in these core areas.

“Allocating $700 vouchers to parents of struggling students and a handful of ‘prizes’ to schools that ‘win’ the literacy and numeracy race pretends to do something about these issues, but will make no difference to outcomes across the country.

“The growing use of vouchers also reflects this Government’s determination to privatise education delivery rather than see it as a public investment in an essential service for the whole community.

“Not a cent is being made available to cover the costs of the mass of testing requirements the Federal Government has imposed on schools, but they intend to use the test results to take credit for handing out $50,000 prizes for ‘winning’ schools.

“Education is not a foot race where money and access to quality education is made available only to ‘medallists’. Quality education – properly resourced – should be available to all students no matter what school or region they come from or whether they top some arbitrary league table.”

Mr Welford said the Commonwealth’s university “endowment fund” was simply the rolled-up capital funding that universities should be receiving from each year’s budget over the next 20 years – and it did not make up for the dramatic cuts universities had endured over the last nine years.

“Instead of announcing the equivalent of the fund’s income as annual capital funding for universities, they have capitalised it up front to make it look better – the universities won’t actually get the full $5 billion any sooner,” he said.

Media contact: Marnie Stitz on 3237 1000 or 0419 734 985