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Editors --- "Finnmarksloven ('The Finnmark Act') - Digest" [2005] AUIndigLawRpr 54; (2005) 9(3) Australian Indigenous Law Reporter 93

INDIGENOUS EDUCATION FUNDING

FINAL REPORT OF THE EMPLOYMENT, WORKPLACE RELATIONS AND EDUCATION REFERENCES COMMITTEE

Senate of Australia

22 June 2005

Chapter 1 – Introduction

1.1 On 16 March this year the committee tabled an interim report for this inquiry. The report dealt with evidence the committee had gathered in the Northern Territory of strong dissatisfaction with new policies in regard to education funding applications and their approval, and the state of confusion resulting from the hasty implementation of these new procedures. The committee concluded that this was placing the education of students at risk, particularly in regard to participation rates. Also at stake was progress, after years of solid work, in raising literacy and numeracy standards, and in encouraging parents to become involved in the running of the school and the educational program. The committee believed, on the basis of evidence put to it, that the new arrangements would also be likely to jeopardise the considerable progress which had been made in building school–community relations, and result in a climate of distrust between communities and the Government.

1.2 This final report confirms that earlier assessment. It is clear from the evidence taken by the committee that the experience of schools and communities in the Northern Territory is widely shared across the country. In many instances the extent of dismay at what is happening as a result of policy changes is even more evident in some Queensland and Western Australian communities and school systems.

Background to the inquiry and its progress

1.3 On 6 December 2004, the Senate referred to this committee an inquiry into the implications for schools of amendments to the Indigenous Education Assistance Act 2000 [(Cth)]. The Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2004 [(Cth)], which was introduced in the House of Representatives on 17 November 2004, provides for funding over the 2005–08 quadrennium. The legislation was passed by the Senate the day after this referral and was assented to on 14 December 2004. Referral to the committee was the only way to give the legislation more careful scrutiny than Parliament was able to do in the limited time the bill was before it. There was an urgent need to have funds appropriated for 2005.

1.4 The inquiry was prompted by reports of concern and confusion which emanated from schools toward the end of 2004. Although the detail of the implementation of the new policy was at that time rather vague, there was sufficient reason for many communities to become concerned about the likely end to the Aboriginal Student Support and Parent Awareness Scheme (‘ASSPA’) funding and significant changes to the administration of what was to become the Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme (‘ITAS’). The committee responded quickly to requests for an inquiry, even though its findings would be delivered six months after the passage of the amendments.

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Observations on the legislation

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1.9 On the face of it, there is nothing in the Government’s drafting of the bill, or in the Minister’s speech introducing the bill which suggests a radical shift in policy. The bill consists largely of one schedule listing the appropriations, specifying accountability processes and other terms and conditions for agreements to be made between ‘providers’ (DEST ‘newspeak’ for schools and systems) and the Commonwealth, including performance reporting and evaluation. There is no specific reference in the bill itself to the programs described in later paragraphs. The amended act, being a states grants instrument, gives no hint as to the substantial changes to implementation detail. Nor is there any such indication in Minister Nelson’s second reading speech in introducing the bill. The Minister speaks of ‘improved program management’, ‘better targeted assistance’, and ‘ongoing initiatives’: all suggestive of a continuing program subject to normal incremental change. …

Leveraging, Targeting and Accountability

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1.12 To maintain the Government’s pressure on the states and on other systems and schools, DEST requires annual statements of achievements and other outcomes. Under the Indigenous Education Agreements now provided for in the act following the 2004 amendment bill, the Commonwealth not only enforces accountability for the funds it provides under the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act, but requires school systems and independent schools to report on how they have advanced, or intend to advance, the objects of the act from funding other than that coming directly from the Commonwealth. ... In this way, the Government is informed as to how well its leverage is succeeding.

1.13 The leverage strategy of detailed reporting, however, affects the operations of schools which do not have the resources to deal with the reporting requirements. The submission from the Association of Independent Schools of South Australia makes the point that the level of reporting and accountability, compared to the relatively small amounts of money available, is a continuing issue because different programs have different accountability and reporting requirements. The submission urges that these arrangements be evaluated so as to improve educational outcomes and allow for more effective use of government funds. …

1.14 The committee acknowledges the importance of accountability, as would be evident from the committee’s scrutiny of the DEST portfolio over many years. As this report shows, however, the committee believes that the accountability processes which are increasingly a feature of DEST-funded programs tend to be out of proportion to the funds provided and are often a burden to administer. They fail to recognise the professional requirements involved in the educational process. Ultimately, they are more ritualistic than authoritative because there are few processes in use to provide independent verification of results. …

ASSPA – PSPI

1.24 Of equal concern, and perhaps of more significance, has been the changed funding arrangement for a program designed more than fifteen years ago, and running with increasing success since 1991: the now discontinued Aboriginal Student Support and Parent Awareness Scheme (‘ASSPA’). This program has been replaced by the Parent School Partnership Initiative (‘PSPI’). As ASSPA, this component guaranteed per capita funding to schools, allowing for family and community agreement on the use of this funding. As PSPI, funding has been reduced, is payable to schools only on application, and according to guidelines which preclude school community responsibility for decisions made about its use.

1.25 DEST commentary on PSPI is rather sparse. The committee is unclear as to whether PSPI bodies are to be subordinated to school councils, with specific responsibility for indigenous matters. The thrust of policy in this vexed area appears to be to give school principals sole responsibility for applications for Commonwealth funds available to a school.

1.26 The committee concludes from the evidence that the Commonwealth may not understand the likely consequences of its failure to continue to support ASSPA. The committee learned very little about the likely operation of the PSPI during the course of this inquiry, probably because no one is quite sure of how it will work. It is not clear whether the Government expects that the spirit of ASSPA will live on in PSPI, and whether parental interest and skills are likely to be retained. PSPI bears all the signs of being a program in search of a policy.

1.27 If it is the Government’s intention to retain some of the old ASSPA spirit, then according to the evidence received by the committee, this is unlikely to happen. PSPI committees risk being be regarded by indigenous people as token bodies since being stripped of their old powers and responsibilities. The committee concludes that for indigenous people a loss of recognition of their status in the school community, which ASSPA gave them, may involve a sense of being marginalised.

1.28 Finally, all the funding to be made available must now be applied for in a cumbersome two stage process, described in more detail in chapter 4. Under new arrangements, payments from DEST based on indigenous enrolments will no longer be made through PSPI or any other program. Rather, school administrators must now make a submission for funding, with reference to the Indigenous Education Programmes Provider Guidelines 2005–2008. Having had reference to the Guidelines, schools must then generate a ‘concept plan’, which is essentially an expression of intent, providing an opportunity for a school to outline its ideas on the purpose and functioning of a project, together with a brief description of the initiative and the results which are expected to be achieved.

1.29 It appears from the guidelines that applications will not be made for the quadrennium: most projects are anticipated to last one to two years. The committee imagines that while teachers will become more confident about making submissions, depending on the results of their first applications, they will remain stressful and time-consuming exercises. So far as is known, reporting may be more frequent than once each year. …

Policy Implementation Issues

The Response from the States and Territories

1.33 The intersection of Commonwealth policy and its administration with state operations is a matter of considerable interest to the committee, but it was touched on only in discussions with officials of the Western Australian Education Department. While senior state and territory officials have been closely involved in negotiating the funding agreements with the Commonwealth, the committee has gained an impression that state and territory officials (with the exception of those from Western Australia) have been, at most, marginally involved in the implementation processes which have taken up so much of the time of principals and their staff in departmental schools. DEST has invited state departmental officers to sit on panels which assess the applications for ITAS and PSPI funding, but these offers have not always been taken up.

1.34 While the committee finds this indifference remarkable, possibly indicating a lack of departmental support for principals and teachers in their dealings with an outside agency, it may also indicate a tension that results from the Commonwealth usurping a states role. State officials may not have accepted that they had any co-responsibility role in administering DEST policies, which in most cases were not supported with any enthusiasm (to say the least) by state ministers.

1.35 If questions about these policy processes and views of state and territory officials were not pressed by the committee, it was because of the unlikelihood of its getting straightforward answers. State officials are understandably circumspect in the evidence they provide to the committee, whether in relation to their own operations, or about the Commonwealth’s programs. …

1.36 The relevance of noting this matter here is that the Commonwealth has placed some emphasis on the fact that funding is allocated on the basis of competition, among other criteria. The Guidelines for PSPI applications state that it is a competitive process, and not all applications can receive funding. … This is a ground-breaking development, intended, the committee presumes, to imbue principals with a competitive spirit. It appears to be based on the premise that some unknown proportion of principals are passive ‘time-servers’, lacking, perhaps, the ‘dynamic and entrepreneurial’ qualities needed for the position; that some of them require a sharp ‘incentive’ to improve their performance.

1.37 In the circumstances of reduced funding, this competitive factor has the potential to deprive some public and other systemic schools of the funding they would have been entitled to under the old scheme. School systems have no choice other than to acquiesce with this policy. The committee presumes that where Commonwealth funding is not forthcoming, for whatever reason, state education departments and Catholic Education Offices will have to make up for the funding shortfall in the interests of equity. This may result in some difficult budgetary decisions at system level.

1.38 The committee’s reflections on the implications for public school governance of measures that come within this legislation are to be found in chapter 4. The committee makes the point here that schools should not be burdened with the task of dealing with two levels of government. Principals of public schools are not employed by the Commonwealth, and it is the appropriate role of state education department officials to deal with DEST. The committee is surprised that state ministers have appeared so nonchalant about the bureaucratic demands made by the Commonwealth on their employees in regard to indigenous and other funding arrangements.

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The Guidelines

1.43 As previously noted, the act is silent on the program details it covers. The Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2004 is in effect a states grants bill, fulfilling the requirements of section 96 of the Constitution. It does not go beyond the appropriation and the conditions that go with it. It is necessary to turn to the Indigenous Education Programmes Provider Guidelines 2005–2008 to find the devil in the detail. The Guidelines cannot be regarded as ‘legislative’ in the formal sense, although it may be argued that they are legislative in character, being extraordinarily detailed and prescriptive, for the purposes of micro-management of the programs by DEST. There are parallel instances of this micro-management trend in DEST’s regulation of higher education, although at least much of the detail there is set out in legislation.

1.44 Notwithstanding this, the committee notes that its indigenous education report of 2000 recommended that schools be directly funded by the Commonwealth. It also notes that state officials are asked to sit on the panels to determine those projects to receive funding. Government senators on the committee also point out that the Investing in Our Schools program, a current Government initiative providing direct funding for schools, is very strongly supported by schools.

1.45 These trends represent a new phenomenon in Australian public administration which has yet to attract the attention of commentators. The committee’s concern in relation to the Guidelines has been with the discretionary powers of local and regional DEST officers in relation to funding applications from schools, and the unnecessarily time-consuming impositions they place on school principals and their staff.

Concept Plans

1.46 In the weeks when the committee was visiting schools, a great deal of the time of the committee was taken up with complaints about having to submit concept plans as a first stage in the application for funding. Apprehension about these plans was fuelled by reports that a high proportion of them were being rejected in the first instance. News of this filtered through to Canberra, and the committee was advised of efforts made by DEST to refine application guidelines. Even so, as late as early June 2005, the committee learned that only 57 per cent of concept plans submitted earned the response of an invitation to make a formal application for funding. …

1.48 The committee has problems with this bureaucratic trend on principle. The committee questions whether it is the proper role of Commonwealth officers to stand in judgement on the merits of school program proposals. DEST does not run schools and would probably lay no claim to any official or recognised expertise in curriculum matters beyond what it can purchase from consultants. It is an imposition on schools for the Commonwealth, which does not control schools, to require them to spend disproportionate time on submissions for relatively small amounts of funding. The politics of Commonwealth indigenous education funding is seriously affecting, and interfering with, what were once successful programs.

1.49 Commonwealth funding arrangements are complex. Their complexity results from policy of long-standing by which the Commonwealth injects funding to schools to ensure that innovation is maintained, that particular sectors are maintained and that needs that may otherwise be overlooked by states are looked after. Increasingly, the Commonwealth has taken a strong and direct interest in particular areas of the curriculum, giving them, for a specific time, national priority status. This happened with citizenship education, and continues now with literacy and numeracy.

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1.51 The committee has always held the view, across the party divides, that without Commonwealth expenditure initiatives, and the conditions attached to them, some states would be likely to reduce their own expenditure on education. Some state education officials have been known to privately acknowledge this reality, even while suffering the Commonwealth’s interference in matters where the states consider their own expertise and experience is being overridden in the process. Whether these developments have had an adverse effect on the culture of educational leadership and policy innovation in the states is an issue that appears to have attracted little commentary or analysis so far.

1.52 The committee’s view is that the conditions which apply to Commonwealth funding need to be commensurate with the amount of funding received, and that educational outcomes should result from genuine agreement in MCEETYA [the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs], rather than because of Commonwealth insistence, reinforced by the funds that are never rejected. The Commonwealth may buy in the educational advice which underpins its policy, but systems have the experience of running schools, and rather more knowledge of what are practicable and achievable outcomes.

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Footnotes omitted.

The full text of this report is available online at

<http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/eet_ctte/indigenoused/report/index.htm> .

John Davis, an Indigenous educator, provides an overview of current developments in Indigenous education policy in this edition at page 103.