The Gonski era of school funding policy: a critical policy analysis

The distribution of government funding for schooling leads to significant differences in the educational opportunities available to individual students. Unsurprisingly, school funding policy continues to be a site of intense political and public debate worldwide. Australia is a prime example given the three school sectors—Public, Catholic, and Independent—that make up the Australian education system. The national-level Review of Funding for Schooling (2011) [the Review] was the latest iteration of these contests. The purpose of this study was to critically examine the policymaking processes of the Review as a cycle and consider its implications for equity in the Australian education system. The study used a qualitative case study research design, bounding the Gonski Era case from September 2004 – September 2018, and produced five key findings. First, the case demonstrated that the Australian education system’s equity problem continues. Second, it illustrated a significant shift in the way equity in schooling is defined and operationalised in the Australian education policy in recent decades. Third, the study showed the non-government school sector to be disproportionally represented and influential across the Gonski Era case’s policy cycle. Fourth, it confirmed that the federal government are increasingly driving school funding policy in Australia, which traditionally has been the purview of the Australian states and territories. And finally, the case’s findings suggest Neoliberalism was the dominant policy idea across the Gonski Era policy cycle, linking school funding policy to globalised economic discourses and shifting the purposes of education and school funding in the process. Based on these findings, future research must continue to interrogate the policymaking process from a critical policy analysis perspective, with a focus on the role and representation of stakeholders across the policy cycle and the extent to which they are proportional. It must also consider and adapt to the increasingly globalised and national approach to education policy, which is changing the education landscape in Australia and elsewhere. While a retrospective critical policy analysis proved generative in terms of producing research findings, the study highlights the importance of stakeholders influencing critical moments in the policy cycle in real-time in order to impact the Australian education system’s equity problem.