Under the current Program for Students with a Disability 2013, an autistic child must have a severe language deficit in order to attract additional funding, which means that high functioning autistic students like my son are deprived of the help they so desperately need in the classroom (or in his case, they are placed at risk of losing their place at an Autism specialist school).
As part of the process I have recently downloaded all 319 pages of the Gonski report and read most of it. I skipped the parts on capital expenditure, but read the rest and highlighted the parts I felt were important to our cause.
I had already joined the ‘I Give A Gonski’ cause, adding my name and my reason for joining to the website that was set up. I already knew the basic nature of the report, as most people who have an interest but haven’t read the full thing probably do: more funding for our schools to help our disadvantaged students achieve their full potential.
But, as I have trawled through the document, my dismay at the current state of our education system has increased, particularly in relation to kids with a disability, and even further in relation to kids in a specialist setting (like my own son). Gonski has revealed a number of problems and my hope is that the recommendations are taken on board by the Government and put into effect. Having seen the Government’s initial response to the report, however, I hold little hope that this will be the case, no matter how many people in this country ‘Give A Gonski’. More on that later.
There are really four ‘overall’ suggestions by the panel.
1) There should be more funding available to schools whose student population is considered disadvantaged, with five factors covering the definition – socio-economic status, Indigeneity, English language proficiency, disability and remoteness.
2) The way that funding is provided needs to be changed – Federal government to provide the greater level of funding for Government schools, and state/territory governments to provide the greater level of funding for non-government schools (currently it is the other way around, with non-government schools being predominantly funded by the Federal Government, and state/territory governments having to fund the bigger public system).
3) A National Schools Resourcing Body should be established that would determine the resource requirements of schools in Australia based on statistical information.
4) Funding to be allocated on a ‘per student’ level, with a base level for each student, and then loadings according to the students level of disadvantage.
These are all good recommendations as far as I am concerned, which I believe would indeed help our young Australians achieve to a higher level. It makes sense when you read it.
When it comes to the 'findings' however, I wasn't quite as excited. The 'findings' are the panel's view on the current situation, the way the system is at the moment. This frightened me.
Why?
Because when it comes to disability resourcing and funding, the panel found that there really isn't enough known about students with disabilities and their resource requirements. When it comes to specialist setting, the report devoted two....that's right, two...paragraphs to this sector, saying that immediate work needed to be done to obtain relevant data regarding the requirements of this sector because nobody seems to know what these kids need.
WTF????? How can the government (federal AND state) not know the requirements of their own charges in relation to their educational needs? WTF??? WTF??? I cannot believe this!!!
So, I decided to look into whether any of the main recommendations had been put into place yet.
Recommendation 35: The establishment of the National Schools Resourcing Body by the middle of this year, so that it could have a good 18 months of research, and a new funding model could be implemented at the start of 2014. The Government seems to have done something about this, with the establishment in March of the Ministerial Schools Funding Reference Group - perhaps not as quickly as Gonski had recommended, but it has been started nevertheless. And there is scope for Australians to add their voice (see link below) to the process.
You can see a table of what has already been done in response to the Gonski review here. I was going to go into it recommendation by recommendation, but this gives a good overview really.
It seems that there is some work being done to at least find out what resources are required by children with disability, and to work on an appropriate loading.
You can contribute to the discussion here so please do so if you have an interest in this area.
It looks like things are starting to move, albeit slowly. Of course Gonski recommends that things got started quicker than they have, but these things never work like that. I'm still not hopeful on the recommendation that the federal government funds public schools and the states/territories fund non-government schools. I read somewhere (I think it was in the report actually) that the current funding arrangement has been part of the constitution since forever, and something like that is hard and complicated to change.
Which leads me back to Change The Criteria. One of the reasons I started looking into Gonski in more detail was to see whether the recommendations meant that we would need to lobby the federal government harder than we are. I'll support Gonski until the cows come home, but none of the findings of the current situation lead me to believe that lobbying the federal government on the Criteria for ASD funding in Victoria is going to make much difference, because they don't really have anything much to do with funding the government schools at the moment. Not sure where it sits regarding disability funding in the non-government sector, but I suspect that these dollars also come from State because I'm told that ASD kids in non-government schools have to meet the same stupid criteria.
So, unfortunately for the Victorian State Government, whatever colour they may be, we will keep fighting until the Criteria is changed.
Talk later
Janeane
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