Having spent the last six months decrying anti-genocide, anti-apartheid, pro-Palestine protests, the Minns NSW government has shown itself devoid of any discernible set of values. Now — in line with the ALP’s habit of imposing Thatcherite policy wrapped in a big RUOK Day-style smile — NSW Labor has decided the one thing most needed by its catastrophically under-resourced public education system is less funding.

In an astounding announcement, Labor declared it would be making $148 million in cuts to public education due to less-than-predicted student enrolments. It is an austerity measure that would see the full-time workload of principals, deputy principals, and assistant principals increased to include part-time teaching on top of their full-time executive workload.

How the government formed the view that the way to repair teacher shortages and declining enrolments in public schools was to give teachers less time and fewer resources to do their job boggles the mind. But of course the Labor Party of the twenty-first century is a case study in jellyfish politics: a spineless blob adrift in a sea of spineless blobs — and a deliberate increase in workload compounded by funding cuts is precisely the behaviour of a jellyfish government. Adrift, amorphous, and full of sting.

After defeating the conservative Perrottet Liberal-National government in last year’s election, the Minns government came into office off the back of promising teacher pay rises, reduced workload, and improved resourcing for public education. Once in government, however, Labor made quick work of backflipping on the promises it made to the NSW Teachers Federation, the largest teachers’ union in the country. It was an extraordinarily hostile way to set the tone for the new administration, to which unionised teachers responded immediately. The union’s ‘Honour the Deal’ campaign ultimately won back the pay rises, along with an EBA that promised to reduce unsustainable workloads.

The Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) is “how much total public funding a school needs to meet its students’ educational needs.” According to For Every Child, a union-led campaign to obtain full funding for public schools,“98% of public schools are resourced below the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS)”, with the only fully funded public schools to be found in the ACT. A briefing paper commissioned by the NSW Teachers Federation found ‘[t]he federal and NSW governments delivered $120 million in overfunding to 130 independent schools in NSW in 2020 alone. Almost 40 per cent of all independent schools examined as part of this study in NSW in 2020 received more than 100 per cent of their designated SRS level of funding.’ The Australian government’s Freedom of Information disclosure log includes documentation detailing the extent of SRS funding to independent and Catholic schools in 2022. Approximately sixty private schools were listed with the government’s share in SRS funding being between 90 and 99 per cent. At least eighty private schools were allocated an SRS entitlement of 100 per cent or more. A number of private schools whose fees range in the low thousands to upwards of $34,000+ a year were overfunded by an SRS allocation exceeding 170 per cent.

It is fair to judge that Labor’s austere lunge might be propelled by a cynical, self-serving attempt to brute-force statistics that would quickly tally less collapsed classes than the previous Liberal government; essentially an effort by the NSW Labor government to mint gold stars for itself. All a jellyfish government knows is austerity, ‘budget measures’, and PR.

Unfortunately, there is no magical spreadsheet solution to fixing the teacher shortage overnight. Putting a principal or executive teacher in front of a class might improve the tally chart but when it comes at the cost of abolishing programs that support both students and teachers, new problems are created and learning outcomes remain unimproved. Forcing principals back onto class en masse will force newly out-of-work casual teachers to leave the profession en masse, creating an even worse casual teacher shortage than where Labor started in 2023. And then what? Are principals to remain on-class indefinitely? When will they do the work required of a principal?

A NSW Department of Education spokesperson said they were “asking schools to prioritise spending that directly leads to improving student outcomes. Our highest priority is to get more teachers in the classroom, and to tackle the teacher shortage crisis. We can’t rebuild enrolment numbers without prioritising teachers in every classroom.”

The reality is that improving recruitment and retention is an incremental process that will flow from improved working and learning conditions over time, not worse conditions subjecting staff to more workload strain while depriving students of learning opportunities and fully supported classrooms.

The Labor Party’s ushering in of a new age of austerity for public education marks an uninterrupted path in a decades-long story of glib policy settings that seek to drive enrolments away from public schools in order to justify slashing funding. By deliberately underfunding schools, government after government has obeyed the same neoliberal ideology that bangs on about the importance of ‘choice’ when it comes to education. The ‘choice’ is an asymmetrical one: either you can afford to send your kids to an overfunded fee-paying school that is for indefensible reasons also publicly funded (the minority of people), or you can’t (the majority of people).

Australia has long had a public education system where scarcity is manufactured to drive up private school enrolments. If Labor is genuinely concerned with falling enrolments, how will cutting funding better equip public schools to win back enrolments from overfunded fee-paying schools?

As with any government imposing austerity measures during a time of plenty, the state requires a rhetorical conceit to manufacture consent from the public. In NSW, that conceit hinges on the flimsy idea that declining enrolments in public schools mandate cuts to funding. Labor in government tends to do the same things as the Liberals but crumbs the meat of its austerity in a different flavour of euphemistic corporate-speak to let us know they had no other choice. It is unconscionable that Labor’s response to declining enrolments in underfunded public schools is not to increase funding but to take more funding away. The cuts will ultimately have negative impacts on learning outcomes and increase burnout among teachers, as well as exacerbate the teacher shortage.

Labor’s ouroboric approach to public education should shiver down every spine. Public schools, unlike their publicly-funded fee-paying counterparts, cater to the highest diversity of needs with the least resources. Shrinking the budgets of already-underfunded public schools is to steer our public education system further into jellyfish-infested waters where policy gives way to the self-fulfilling prophecies of neoliberal ideology. Labor’s new austerity measures will only further the entrenchment of widespread educational disadvantage while propping up fee-paying schools.

So what is to be done?

Private schools have received billions of dollars in public funding in what the NSW government characterises as a “sector-blind funding model for all NSW schools, including non-government schools”. A private school that receives public money is not a private school: it is a fee-paying public school. As evidenced in the 2023 edition of the Association of Independent Schools of NSW’s snapshot report, a whopping 45 per cent of funding for independent schools came from the public purse (based on 2020-2021 arrangements). The overfunding of private schools using public money is a symptom of a public service that has been rotted for a quarter of century by a political class with no vision beyond producing dubious, misleading statistics to deploy at the next election. In short, full funding for public schools should be immediately instated. Whether that funding is facilitated by federal Labor or state Labor, they must sort it out quicksticks if they are at all serious about beginning to repair the damage wrought by previous governments.

If Labor were smart, the government would redirect public funds away from private schools and reinvest it in public education. If a private school can’t survive without public handouts, then it should either be nationalised or do what every other private business does and look at alternatives that don’t include corporate welfare. Cutting off private schools from taxpayer handouts and redirecting these funds toward resourcing public schools to a world-class standard can only have a positive impact on enrolment numbers and learning outcomes. As myself and many others have already pointed out, the continued public funding of private schools will only compound and cement the impacts of disadvantage, condemning public education to privatisation-by-neglect.

Image: Yu-Chan Chen