Challenging inequality in Australian schools: Gonski and beyond

Abstract

In this paper I look at the most recent policy attempt to address the intractable issue of inequality in Australian schools, the Review of Funding for Schooling Final Report (2011), colloquially known as the ‘Gonski Report’, or simply ‘Gonski’. I highlight its important insights and some of its analytical limitations. I show how a fixation on sector-by-sector (government, Catholic and independent) analysis and disputation distracts from layers of disadvantage and advantage across all sectors, while also acknowledging that there is a disproportionate concentration of disadvantage in the government sector which must thus be properly funded. I illustrate how socio-educational advantage (SEA) and disadvantage are compounded and how the social segregation between schools on the top and bottom rungs is manifest and with associated problems. As implied throughout, systemic relational analysis, which recognises that educational advantage and disadvantage are mutually constituted is a diagnostic necessity which is absent in the Gonski Report and which thus led it to focus on disadvantaged schools rather than on the systemic relationships that also contribute to disadvantage. It is thus rather timid in its recommendations. Even so, I argue, it deserves support because the problems it identifies and seeks to address are dire.