Media release today from the Hon Peter Garrett MP (Minister for School Education; Minister for Early Childhood and Youth). Worth repeating.

Christopher Pyne has shown once again that he has no idea about how the school funding system works or what our plans are – and he has no interest in finding out.

His latest claims show a complete lack of understanding about the National Plan for School improvement and follow a succession of ridiculous positions on the important issue of school funding:

• He dismissed the Gonski Report within 20 minutes of it being released.
• He said he would repeal any legislation we introduced before he had even seen it.
• He has consistently said he will keep a broken funding model that will see schools across Australia lose up to $5.4 billion in coming years.
• He continues to pretend the Opposition would index schools at 6 per cent when he knows the current indexation rate is 3.9 per cent and is estimated to fall to 3 per cent from 2014.
• He claims the Coalition cares about teacher quality when his real plans are to slash $425 million from our Teacher Quality National Partnership.

He has also confirmed he doesn’t even think it is his job to come up with a better way to fund schools, even though the most comprehensive independent review in 40 years found conclusively a new model is needed.

How does he expect anyone to take him seriously on education when he doesn’t even think it’s his job to come up with a plan to fix a broken school funding system?

The National Plan for School Improvement includes a new fairer school funding model. We want every child’s education to be supported by a new nationally consistent Schooling Resource Standard.

This would include a base amount per student and additional ‘loadings’ to address school and student disadvantage. These loadings would support Indigenous students, students with a disability, students with limited English language skills and schools in regional and remote areas – exactly what was recommended in the Gonski Review.

We have always recognised the important role of education authorities, including government, Catholic and independent schools, and the need for them to retain some flexibility to address local need. The Gonski Review also supported the role of system redistribution noting that it would need to be more publicly transparent.

This approach is exactly what we are negotiating with the states, territories and non-government education authorities. It represents the biggest change to school funding in 40 years.

Mr Pyne clearly opposes both transparency and needs-based funding and has said that he will not sign up to the idea of Australian schools being amongst the best in the world.

We are prepared to make significant additional investment but we also expect the states to pay their fair share. We can’t do this if some states continue to cut funding to their own education budgets.

That’s why we’ve asked states to commit to at least 3 per cent indexation and not cut further funding.

If Mr Pyne had spent more time reading the Gonski Review and less time dismissing it, he would know what we are proposing is consistent with the core recommendations of the review.

Mr Pyne’s latest claims do nothing but confirm that the Opposition simply don’t have a plan for the future of our schools – and are clearly not bothering to develop one.

The Coalition’s only plan for schools it to slash funding, sack one in seven teachers and squeeze more kids into every classroom.

Cutting funding from education is what Liberals do. Only Labor can be trusted to deliver the best results for schools across Australia.