What’s happened in the ten years since Gonski?

It’s been over a decade since the release of the Gonski report, the most significant school funding review in Australia’s recent history.

The report, handed down in late 2011, proposed a fairer funding model to give children a high-quality education, no matter where they came from.

It contained 41 recommendations and allocated $5 billion per year to school funding.

Ten years later experts say that private school fees have increased by 4.5 per cent, state government funding to public schools has been cut, and national school results have declined. 

A new book Waiting for Gonski: How Australia failed its schools traces the string of policy decisions and events that led us to this point.

Education Review spoke with the book’s authors, Canberra-based teacher and writer Tom Greenwell and former secondary school principal and writer Chris Bonner AM.