Educators have low expectations for the budget

Source: Financial Review

Nearly $4 billion dollars could be released for university infrastructure if the government would redirect the Education Investment Fund (EIF) to its original purpose.

The Group of Eight universities says money is literally sitting on the table because legislation intended to repurpose the fund had never passed Parliament.

The fund was created in 2008 to finance “strategically focused infrastructure” in higher education.

In 2015 the Coalition said the money would be directed into the National Disability Insurance Scheme, but the required changes never went before MPs.

Chief executive of the G8, Vicki Thomson, said universities were hit with savage cuts to enrolments in 2017 and to research funding in 2018 and it was increasingly difficult to deal with the damage from these financial setbacks.

She said a stroke of the pen could redirect the EIF money without the government having to backtrack on previous belt tightening.

The major universities want a guarantee from federal Treasurer Josh Fydenberg in the budget to inject $7.8 billion into the Medical Research Future Fund. The fund is meant to hit $20 billion by 2021, but this will only happen if the next instalment is made later this year, which needs a commitment on Tuesday night.

Both the G8 and the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes (AAMRI) said there was a lack of transparency in the way the Medical Research Future Fund hands out funds, which takes place at the discretion of the minister. The G8 warned this exposed the fund to being raided for pork barreling in this week’s election-eve budget.

The president of the AAMRI, Vlado Perkovic, said Australia invests just 0.6 per cent of total health expenditure in the MRFF and related National Health and Medical Research Council.

“Now is the ideal time to look at our health system and see how we can use research to make transformative changes,” said Professor Perkovic.

Universities Australia said data from last week’s Excellence in Research for Australia showed 90 per cent of higher research had been independently assessed as “world class or above”.

But total government investment in R&D is projected to fall to just over 0.5 per cent of GDP in 2018- 2019, which is lower than it was in 1978.

CEO Catriona Jackson said future ERA rankings would deterioraite if the government kept cutting research spending.

The vice-chancellor of Australia’s leading outer-metropolitan university, Western Sydney University, Barney Glover, said infrastructure commitments were needed in forward estimates to match spending by state governments.

He said Sydney’s second airport was due to open in 2026 but it would only be workable if the federal government put hard numbers on the money to attract businesses and finish rail connections to the site.

“You don’t need to spend much time in Asia to see how important connectivity is. The government has to complete the promised connections. For the western Sydney Aerotropolis that includes rail links to the north, south and south west.”

He said the 2017 funding freeze was beginning to bite harder and his university was working with increasingly smaller margins. He wanted a sign on Tuesday night that when the freeze comes off the new mechanism for funding would factor in that population growth in outer metro areas such as Western Sydney is higher than the national average.

The schools sector said the trend line of government spending on schools was impressive but spending per student as a percentage of GDP was less than in Australia’s OECD peers such as Germany, Korea, New Zealand and the UK.

That’s even after taking into account the government’s promise of an extra $36.7 billion in money for Gonski reforms, taking total spending in the 10 years to 2029 to $307 billion. That includes public and private schools.

Senior education fellow at the Grattan Institute, Julie Sonneman, said schools were looking for new expenditure in four areas – an evidence-for-learning institute; learning progressions; a unique student identifier; and new online assessment tools.

“We’d like to see a discrete budget measure around an evidence institute.

“There’s more scientific evidence coming to light about what works in the classroom. We need to embed those practices in how schools work.

“Everyone has their own interpretation of what works in the classroom. We need to get more systematic in what teachers need.”

She said there was often resistance from teachers to changing methodology but they could be encouraged in new directions by seeing data on successful practice.

The second Gonski review of education proposed an evidence institute and the Labor Party has promised to spend nearly $300 million on such an organisation if it is elected in May.

Ms Sonnemann said learning progressions were a tool used alongside curriculums to help teachers pinpoint where a student’s understanding of a subject was at. It was another a Gonski idea but needed a commitment of money to roll it out nationally.

Similarly, funding was needed to open up use of online assessment. At the moment all the focus was on NAPLAN. But teachers needed software to help them in day to day classes so they could test a student on the spot and adjust teaching to match shortcomings.