Funds shortfall means 5000 students Fail to get help they need

Rails against an injustice going on in Tasmanian schools that leaves students with a disability without the level of funding they require to prosper

UNDERFUNDING public education is compounding disadvantage for students with disability in Tassie schools.

Even when students are assessed as having a disability that requires adjustments to support learning, governments hold back some funding. Worse still, using publicly available data, we estimate 5000 Tasmanian students with a disability miss out and receive no additional support.

The Tasmanian Educational Adjustments model funds schools according to the type of changes, or adjustments, a student with a disability needs to learn on the same basis as other students without a disability.

It’s a welcome improvement on the previous IQ-based model but, with administrative reforms to the model, schools must be equipped to assess students for funding.

Teachers need the time to work with families, produce individual learning plans, work with professional support staff, collate portfolios of evidence — all of which is required in a system suffering teacher shortages and underfunding.

The teacher shortage extends to other professionals, such as school psychologists, speech pathologists and occupational therapists. These are often of importance to students with disability. It’s not uncommon to hear of year-long waits for students to receive assessments and follow-up from professional support staff, and disturbingly the state government, when asked about this in Budget Estimates, had to take the question “on notice”.

There’s a federally legislated agreed amount of minimum funding — called the Schooling Resource Standard — that schools require, at a minimum, in order to provide a quality education for every child, but it is not delivered in full.

Not a single Tasmanian public school receives all its minimum amount of funding.

The amount withheld is equivalent in value to employing about 1400 teachers, or an average of seven teachers for every school. Funding is critical and enables smaller class sizes, more individual attention for students, and more supports for students with disability.

Schools receive a base level of funding and then loadings, which are to recognise different types of challenges, such as disability. But the loadings themselves are

insufficient and there’s another rub — they are calculated as a percentage of the Schooling Resource Standard, which, as we know, is not fully delivered, so it’s a “percentage of not enough”.

The new national approach to calculating funding loadings for disability, introduced in 2018, is according to the level of educational adjustments required. There are four levels, with the top “Extensive” level attracting the most funding. Students assessed as being in the lowest category have a disability, but no additional resources are provided to the teacher to support that child’s education. The Commonwealth has decided that although the child needs increased monitoring and personalised learning, no additional classroom resources are needed, and this needs to change.

At a national level, a review of the disability categories and loading levels is needed to calculate the real cost of ensuring students with disability receive a quality education. At a state level, a review of the implementation of the adjustments model is required to find out, among other things, why up to 5000 students are missing from the system.

Unfortunately, the Tasmanian government hasn’t shown a great appetite to advocate for public school funding in general or disability in particular. In 2018 the state government waived through a 46 per cent federal funding cut to students with disability. But

Covid-19 has shown what governments can do when they prioritise, and public education funding must be an urgent priority.

Action is well overdue, and it starts with the state and federal governments agreeing, between them, to deliver all of the minimum amount of funding schools need to see all students shine.

David Genford is state president of the Australian Education Union.