DEPUTY Opposition Leader Tanya Plibersek lashed out at Education Minister Simon Birmingham on a recent visit to Minimbah Pre and Primary School.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Ms Plibersek said the federal government needed to commit to the Gonski needs-based funding model beyond 2017 or Indigenous education would suffer.
“It’s robbing children, we are robbing schools and robbing children of money that was promised to them in the needs-based funding system,” she said.
“Everybody knows it, the only person that’s in denial is the federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham who’s trying to pretend that ripping $29 billion out of our schools in coming decades won’t make a difference to kids’ education, of course it will.”
Principal of Minimbah Pre and Primary School Jenny Brown mirrored the sentiment and admitted she did not know how the school would continue to function without needs-based funding.
“The government needs to make sure they fully implement needs-based funding, the Gonski model, we would be so much worse off without the Gonski funding, in fact I don’t know that we’d be able to keep going it’s that important to us,” she said.
The school employs an Aboriginal teacher with a PhD, numerous Aboriginal teachers aids and does not charge school fees.
“I can see a point that we will reach where the Gonski funding runs out that we just won’t be able to function anymore because we rely entirely on that funding,” Ms Brown said.
“There’s nothing more important than education because it needs to lead to Aboriginal people looking after their own affairs and looking after things for themselves, until people are getting through those university degrees it’s just not going to happen.”
One of the many barriers to Indigenous education is a lack of culturally relevant content in the classroom, but Minimbah School has actively incorporated an Indigenous perspective into all of their subject areas.
Ms Brown said that often Indigenous children can be disillusioned by the differences in the history they are taught at school and the one they are taught at home and that’s why the Indigenous perspective their education offers is so important.
“It needs to be recognised that our regional people are the first people here and the history that’s taught needs to reflect that,” she said.
Minister for Education and Training Simon Birmingham said the government was committed to working with schools to establish a new funding deal after 2017.
“What we have now is the unacceptable situation where there are significant inconsistencies when you compare what federal funding a student attracts in a government, Catholic or independent school in one state, compared to what federal funding that identical student would attract in a comparable school in other state,” he said.
Mr Birmingham said the Turnbull Government would grow schools funding from $16 billion in 2016 to $20.1 billion in 2020 and replace the current system with a fair needs-based model.