OECD Report Gives Australia's School Funding a C

The OECD’s ‘Education at a Glance’ report shows that Australia is average in the funding given to public schools and one of the more generous when it comes to private schools.
Australia has the highest level of expenditure on private educational institutions in the OECD, at 0.7% of GDP.  This is more than double the OECD wide average of 0.3% of GDP spent on private schools.

Australia spends 3.3% of GDP on public schools, just scraping above the OECD average of 3.2% of GDP.  Twelve countries invest more in public education than Australia does: Belgium, Costa Rica, Finland, France, Iceland, Israel, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and UK.

The report also found that Australia has the worst record on First Nations attainment when compared to Canada, Mexico, New Zealand and the United States, with a 31%-point gap between First Nations and non-Indigenous students. The gap is almost double the next largest in Mexico.

According to the report:
● Australia barely scrapes over the OECD average for this indicator with 57% of SES disadvantaged students reaching proficient level in maths by the end of school -0 floundering in the middle of the pack of OECD nations
● 88% of advantaged students are above proficiency level in maths - a gap of 31 % point between the top and bottom quartiles of advantage/disadvantage.
● Across the OECD - “Since 2016, the share of 18–24-year-olds not in employment, education or training has fallen from 16% to 14% on average across the OECD. At the same time, the share of 25–34-year-olds without an upper secondary qualification has decreased from 17% to 14%.” - Meanwhile completion is Australia is going backwards to 76% completions last year.

AEU Federal President Correna Haythorpe said, “Funding inequity for Australia’s public schools is a direct result of a deliberate undermining of the Gonski review’s school funding reforms by the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Governments.

“This report makes it clear that Australia is a global outlier in its failure to fully fund public education - it’s a shocking position for our country to be in.

“Currently only 1.3% of Australian public schools are funded to meet their Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) entitlements. That means over 98% of our public schools are not funded to meet the most basic student requirements.”