Speech - Better and Fairer Schools Agreement Statement to Parliament

Mr Speaker

12 months ago the Prime Minister and I announced that the Australian Government and all States and Territories had signed the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement. 

This is a 10-year agreement. 

It fixes the funding of our public schools. Once and for all. 

It’s the biggest new investment by an Australian Government in public education ever. 

An extra $16.5 billion over 10 years. An extra $50 billion in the decade after that. 

That’s locked in. 

We have passed legislation through the Parliament that makes it all but impossible for a future Liberal Government to do what they did last time and cut the funding in this agreement for public schools.

But this agreement is not just about funding. It’s not a blank cheque. 

It includes clear targets and practical reforms. 

Targets for attendance, literacy and numeracy and students finishing high school. 

And reforms to help us get there. 

That includes evidence based teaching, Phonics Checks and Numeracy Checks to identify children who need additional support, and Small Group Tutoring to help children who need additional support to catch up and keep up. 

It also includes reforms to support the health and wellbeing of students and to boost the strength of our most important asset in every school. Our incredible teachers. 

The investment and ambition in this agreement means that transparency and accountability is critical. 

For the Australian Government. For the Australian Parliament. And for the Australian people. 

That’s why when I introduced legislation to the Parliament just over a year ago to lock this funding in, I included a requirement that the Minister for Education report annually to the Parliament on its implementation. 

This is the first of these reports. 

Mr Speaker

Education is the most powerful cause for good.

It doesn’t just change lives. 

Its impact ricochets through generations. 

It changes communities and it changes countries. 

And it’s public education that does a lot of the heavy lifting.  

It plays an outsized role in educating the most disadvantaged children in this country. 

The children who are most likely to start behind or fall behind. 

The children who need our help the most. 

And these are the schools that are the most underfunded. 

In April 2010 Julia Gillard commissioned what would come to be known as the Gonski Review. 

That review, chaired by David Gonski AC, recommended a new funding model for schools. 

What we now call the Schooling Resource Standard - or SRS. 

The SRS sets the estimated level of total public funding each school should receive to meet the educational needs of its students. 

At the moment, the base per student amount is $14,467 for a child in primary school and $18,180 for a child in high school. 

As part of the model that David Gonski recommended, additional funding is provided on top of that for:

• Students with a disability
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students
• Students experiencing socio-educational disadvantage
• Students with low-English proficiency; and
• School size and location.

These are called loadings. 

In practice it means students from priority equity cohorts attract additional funding over the base amount. 

When you put the base amount and loadings together, in 2025 public school students received on average about $21,376 in SRS funding.

There is another part to the Gonski Model. 

For non-government schools, the base amount is reduced based on the median income of the parents of the children who attend the school. 

This is referred to as Capacity to Contribute. 

Because of this, in 2025 non-government school students received on average $15,711 in SRS funding. 

All of this is what’s often described as the Gonski model or needs-based funding. 

Fully funding schools, and who provides that funding, is where it gets more complicated. 

All non-government schools currently receive 100 percent of their SRS funding based on this formula, or they are on track to get there, or they are above it and coming back down to it. 

The Australian Government provides 80 percent of that SRS funding. The States and Territories provide the remaining 20 percent. 

For public schools it is different. 

Most of the funding is provided by the States and Territories. 

Under previous agreements the States have agreed to provide 75 percent of the SRS and the Australian Government has agreed to provide 20 percent. 

That doesn’t add up to 100 percent. 

The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement finally fixes that. 

It means the States and Territories will provide 75 percent of the SRS and the Australian Government will provide 25 percent. 

This will ramp up over the course of the 10 year agreement. 

The exception is the Northern Territory where the Australian Government will provide 40 percent and the Territory will provide 60 percent. 

The details of the ramp up in funding are set out in the bilateral agreements we have signed with States and Territories and put online. 

They are also set out in this report that I table today. 

I should add at this point that we have not yet signed a 10 year bilateral agreement with Victoria, but I expect to sign that agreement this year. 

These agreements also fix something else. 

The former Morrison Government allowed States to count the capital depreciation of their assets in calculating their 75 percent. 

This is obviously not a real investment in education that should be counted. And now it can’t. 

As part of the agreements we have struck, indirect costs like capital depreciation will be phased out.

Mr Speaker

That’s the funding. This is the challenge.  

Finishing high school has never been more important. 

Now it’s your ticket to the show. 

So many jobs today require you to finish school and then go on to TAFE or uni. 

That’s only going to increase. 

Today about 60 percent of the workforce has a tertiary qualification. 

The Universities Accord estimates that this will need to jump to 80 percent by 2050.

When most of us were kids the number of students who finished high school jumped dramatically. 

It leapt from about 40 percent to about 80 percent. 

That was nation changing reform. 

But in the last decade or so we have seen that fall. 

In 2017, it hit a peak of 84.8 percent. 

Every year after that it has dropped, bottoming out at 79.1 percent in 2023. 

Most of this has occurred in public schools. There it dropped from 83.1 percent to 73.6 percent.

Just now it’s started to turn around. 

A few weeks ago the ABS released the data for 2025. It shows high school completion rates going up. Across the board. 

For boys, for girls, in Catholic schools, in independent schools, and in public schools. 

That’s good news. But it’s just the start. There is a lot more work to do. 

The same trend is evident when we look at school attendance.  

Attendance rates have dropped from 92.7 percent in 2014 to 86.5 percent in 2022. 

This is not something we can just put down to Covid.  Attendance rates dropped every year between 2014 and 2022.

It’s now started to turn around. Last year it increased to 88.8 percent.

Again that’s a start. But there is a lot more work to do. 

Teacher shortage data follows a similar trend. 

When I was sworn in as Minister for Education this was at crisis levels. 

There are still big challenges, but things are starting to turn around here too. 

The number cancelled classes in NSW because there isn’t a teacher has dropped by more than half. 

This year teacher vacancies there have hit a 12 year low. 

There has also been a big turnaround in the number of people starting teaching degrees.

Between 2017 and 2023 it dropped by 22 percent.  

In the last few years it has bounced back. Up 20 percent. 

And this year preliminary data indicates university offers are up another 6.3 percent. 

Again, that’s good, but there is still a lot more work to do. 

Mr Speaker

It’s literacy and numeracy data that gives us the best insight into the scale of the challenge we face. 

Let me start with the good news.  

NAPLAN data tells us that the average eight year old is reading about a year ahead of where eight year olds were when NAPLAN testing started almost 20 years ago. 

Now the bad news. 

Over that time, the gap in reading skills of eight year olds from wealthy families and children from poorer families has doubled. 

In 2008 that gap was about a year. Now it’s two.  

By the middle of high school that gap’s about five years. 

One in 10 children today are below what we used to call the minimum standard for literacy and numeracy.

It’s one in three children from poor families.

And most of them never catch up.

80 percent of children who are below the minimum standard when they are eight are still behind when they are fifteen. 

In other words, most of the children who start behind or fall behind, stay behind.

Disadvantage is cemented in.

Last year’s NAPLAN results had some good news. 

Literacy and numeracy rates showed some improvement, particularly in Victoria. 

But again it’s just the start. 

There is a lot more work to do. 

Mr Speaker

There are some people who say that funding isn’t important. We just need reform.

And there are others who say the opposite. 

The truth is both are required. 

As David Gonski said in his report: 

‘resources alone will not be sufficient to fully address Australia’s schooling challenges and achieve a high quality, internationally respected schooling system. The new funding arrangements must be accompanied by continued and renewed efforts to strengthen and reform Australia’s schooling system.’

In January 2023 the Productivity Commission released its report on the former government’s National School Reform Agreement. 

It doesn’t pull any punches. 

It said implementation of the agreement was slow and had little impact.

It was also very critical that the agreement:

• had only one single weak target for academic achievement;
• lacked targeted reforms to improve outcomes for students from poor backgrounds, from the regions, indigenous students and students who do not meet the minimum standards for literacy and numeracy; and
• lacked transparent, independent and meaningful reporting on the reform activity of governments.

It called this ‘an accountability deficit’. 

It also made a number of recommendations to fix this. They include:

• clear and measurable targets for academic achievement of all students, in particular students from priority equity cohorts;
• targets to reduce the proportion of students who do not meet minimum standards of literacy and numeracy; and
• public reporting on progress on implementing reforms and achieving targets.

It also recommended that reform focus on three key areas:

• Lifting student outcomes;
• Supporting student wellbeing; and
• Supporting the teaching workforce.

Based on this, in March 2023 Education Ministers appointed Dr Lisa O’Brien AM, to Chair an Expert Panel to advise Ministers on the targets and reforms that should be included in the next agreement. 

That report was handed to Ministers in October 2023, and many of its recommendations form part of the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement. 

That’s the background. These are the targets: 

• By 2030, increase by 10 percent the share of students achieving Strong or Exceeding results in reading and numeracy, as measured by NAPLAN, with clear improvement for priority equity cohorts;
• By 2030, reduce by 10 percent the share of students who need additional support in reading and numeracy, as measured by NAPLAN;
• By 2030, lift the national rate of students receiving a Year 12 certificate by 7.5 percentage points, with clear improvement for priority equity cohorts;
• By 2031, increase the proportion of 20 to 24 year olds - including First Nations young peoples - with a Year 12 or equivalent to 96 percent, in line with the National Agreement on Closing the Gap;
• By 2030, lift national student attendance back to 91.4 percent (the 2019 level), and return to 2019 levels for priority equity cohorts;
• By 2035, close the attendance gap so priority equity cohorts attend at the same rate as the overall student population;
• By 2035, increase the engagement rate of domestic initial teacher education students - those who complete or remain enrolled - by 10 percentage points; and
• By 2035, increase the engagement rate of First Nations initial teacher education by 10 percentage points.

These are the targets. 

The reforms to help us get there are even more important. 

Let me take you through them. 

First, lifting student outcomes. 

Mr Speaker, the reading wars are over. We know what works. 

We also know the earlier you identify a child who needs help, and provide them with that help, the better.

Eight is too late.

And we also know this.

Children who fall behind can catch up if they receive targeted support, in small groups, a couple of days a week. 

What’s called small group tutoring.

That’s what these agreements help fund.

Evidence based teaching. 

Phonics checks.

Numeracy checks.

And small group tutoring.

All States and Territories are implementing evidence based teaching. 

This includes what’s called explicit teaching where teachers break learning into manageable steps, explain and show new ideas clearly, and guide students as they build understanding and confidence. 

The impact of that is clear in the data that came out just a few weeks ago.  

The NSW Government released the latest data on their Year 1 Phonics Check. 

What it shows is very exciting. 

In 2022, 55 percent of students who did the Phonics Check were considered on track. 

Last year, that jumped to 64 percent. 

That’s a big jump in three years. 

From about one in two, to nearly two thirds on track. In just three years. 

This shows the importance of the reforms that are happening in NSW and that we are rolling out across the country. 

This year, for the first time, every State and Territory will roll out a Year 1 Phonics Check. 

Under the agreement all States and Territories are also required to roll out a Numeracy Check from 2028. 

That is the requirement under the agreement, but it is coming forward. 

All States and Territories, except Western Australia, will now pilot or roll out a Numeracy Check this year. 

These checks identify children very early who need additional help. Before they turn 8. 

The agreement also helps fund things like Small Group Tutoring that help them catch up. 

The evidence is clear. High quality, targeted supports can significantly help struggling students to catch up on months of learning. 

States and Territories are now rolling this out. 

All of this is embedded in the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement.   

In the last 12 months Education Ministers have also agreed to take further action to improve student outcomes. 

This includes keyhole surgery on the curriculum. Starting with maths. Starting with the first three years of maths. 

If you get maths, it helps to set you up for success. 

It’s critical for work and for life, and it’s really important to get the basics right, early. 

If you don’t get the basics right in the first few years of school, you can’t build on it. 

Learning maths is cumulative. You learn it step by step, and that’s why we have to get the first three years right. 

A number of principals and teachers have told us they think the current maths curriculum is too complex. Others have told us teachers need more support to implement it, with clearer advice about what to teach in what order. 

That’s why Ministers have agreed the first part of the curriculum we need to work on is the first three years of maths.  And that work will happen this year. 

Mr Speaker

The second key area of reform is supporting student wellbeing. 

There is an obvious link between health and education.

If you are struggling with your mental health your education tends to suffer too.

You are less likely to be at school, and less likely to be keeping up at school. 

It works the other way too. 

If you fall behind, and what the teacher is saying doesn’t make sense, it can affect attendance, it can affect your mental health. 

By Year 9, students experiencing poor mental health are on average 1.5 to 2.8 years behind the rest of the class in literacy and numeracy.

That’s why some of the funding in this agreement is also focused here. 

To support a range of different health and wellbeing services to support learning. 

In WA that includes funding complex behaviour support coordinators in 192 schools.

And a pilot of full service schools, where you can potentially have nurses, psychologists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, all on site.

Ministers have also agreed to take further action to improve behaviour and stop bullying. 

Bullying today is different to what it was like when we were at school. Now it can follow you all the way home. The internet means you can never get away from it and everyone can see it. 

Last year Ministers agreed to a national plan that includes all schools taking initial steps to respond to bullying within 
two school days. 

Just last week NSW also announced they would require students and parents to sign or acknowledge a new code of conduct to improve student behaviour. 

Students will also be explicitly taught the behaviour standards expected of them. 

I have asked NSW to brief all Ministers on this when we next meet. 

At our meeting last month we also agreed to review the curriculum to help combat the rise of antisemitism and strengthen the teaching of Australian values. 

At the same meeting we were briefed by the Health Minister Mark Butler on the work he is doing to develop the Thriving Kids program and how it is expected to interact with schools. 

Thriving Kids will start to roll out later this year, and provide community based support for children eight and under with  developmental delays or autism with low to moderate needs.

Mr Speaker 

The third key area of reform is the work we do to strengthen the teaching workforce. 

There is nothing more important in a classroom than a teacher. 

I think we can all remember that teacher who changed our lives. And we don’t have enough of them. 

I mentioned earlier how serious the teacher shortage crisis was when I was sworn in, and how this is starting to turn around. 

Part of this is because of pay rises that have been implemented in a number of States and Territories. 

States and Territories are also taking action to reduce the unnecessary admin burden that can lead to burn out. 

This includes everything from the employment of more administrative staff to the effective use of AI. 

The Australian Government’s Workload Reduction Fund helps fund some of this.

Different States have also included more time for professional development in their enterprise agreements and the right to disconnect, so teachers aren’t responding to parents emails or messages late at night. 

All of this is important, and having an impact, but there is more to do. 

This year we have made a big change to changed what teaching students are taught at university, to make it more practical and better prepare them for the classroom. 

This includes a stronger focus on how the brain works, how to teach children to read and write and count, and how to manage disruptive classrooms.

These changes are a long time coming, and they are rolling out right now. 

Commonwealth Teaching Scholarships are also rolling out this year. They are worth up to $40,000 and require you to commit in return to working in a public school for up to four years. 

Paid Prac also rolls out this year. For the first time ever the Australian Government is providing financial support to help teaching students with their practical training. 

States are acting here too. 

South Australia, for example, has just announced they will employ first and second year teaching students as part time student support officers. 

There are other States and Territories that do this too. 

All of this is part of rebuilding our teaching workforce. 

The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement goes further.

It focuses on providing teachers with quality assured curriculum resources and evidence based materials, developed with the profession and aligned to the evidence about how students learn. 

Work is also underway on the development of a First Nations Teacher and School Leader Strategy.  Its aim is to build the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers, and Education Ministers will consider it when we next meet. 

Mr Speaker

The Agreement also includes a number of key National Enabling Initiatives.

This includes implementation of the Schools Unique Student Identifier. 

That was supposed to have been done by the former government. We have now passed legislation to put it in place.  When Ministers next meet we will discuss how it should be used. 

Mr Speaker

Since the Agreement was struck Ministers have also agreed in principle on a very significant potential reform. 

Something that has also been talked about for a long time.

And that’s bringing together the bodies that are currently responsible for the national curriculum, national testing, national teacher standards and independent research under one roof.

An Australian Teaching and Learning Commission.

Something that has the potential to be bigger than the sum of its parts. 

To do all of this work and more.

To improve coordination.

To oversee and drive the reforms we are making to initial teacher education in our universities.

And to help us implement the reforms and hit the targets that every government in the country has signed up to, and that I have outlined today. 

Ministers have set up a group to work on this, and we will consider their recommendations later this year. 

Mr Speaker

Last but not least is the work we are doing to improve transparency and accountability. 

I mentioned earlier the Productivity Commission’s scathing assessment of the last agreement, and what it called “an accountability deficit”. 

This Agreement requires States and Territories to produce an Annual Implementation Report setting out progress on implementing the reforms and reaching the targets. 

This will be published in a new public reporting dashboard. 

Progress under the Agreement will be independently assessed through a mid-term review that will commence in 2028. 

Mr Speaker

We have a good education system in Australia, but the truth is it can be a lot better and a lot fairer. 

What I have set out today is proof of that. 

That’s why this Agreement is so important. 

It’s about closing the funding gap and the education gap. 

Funding based on need. 

And reform based on evidence. 

One tied to the other. 

I don’t want us to be a country where your chances in life depend on who your mum or dad are, where you live, where you went to school or the colour of your skin. 

It’s what we do here in education that, more than anything else, has the potential to change that. 

I am not naive. 

None of this is easy or quick. 

If it was it would be done by now. 

But I am determined. 

And we are just getting started. 

I am pleased to table the first Better and Fairer Schools Agreements Progress Report.