Community and education commentators at the AEU Poverty Forum agreed that unexpected school fees are causing serious problems for poorer students and their families. Fiona Sexton reports.

Students living in poverty are being marginalised by a growing user-pays mentality and a lack of systemic responsibility for equity and disadvantage in government schools.

This was a key issue at the AEU Poverty Forum in June where attendees raised concerns that rising discretionary costs and levies in schools sideline children in poverty.

The forum was co-hosted with the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), the Institute for Youth Education and Community at Victoria University, Jesuit Social Services, the National Coalition Against Poverty and Brotherhood of St Laurence.

Victoria's Good Shepherd Youth and Family Services had the results of recent research to support the common view. Disadvantaged students and families are being forced to make educational choices based on costs, says social policy research unit manager Marilyn Webster. Good Shepherd wrote in its 2002 report User Pays. Who Pays? of growing pressure from schools for parents to pay “voluntary” fees or contributions.

Parents report receiving bills for the fees, or having them taken directly from their Education Maintenance Allowance, says Webster. Victoria's EMA government assistance is applied and distributed through schools to help low income students buy books and uniforms and to pay for camps.

Such situations highlighted “a deliberate obfuscation” by the Victorian government, says Webster. “The education department doesn't want to direct schools clearly on entitlements and rights—it is very aware of the cost pressures.”

Punitive and exclusionary

Anglicare Tasmania's Jo Flanagan says the Tasmanian government allocated $2.1 million this year to meet discretionary levies and costs, enabling some families to meet schools' extra charges and fees. But it is also clear that attempts to recoup money through punitive and exclusionary practices have wide ranging consequences for low income families.

Anglicare's 2002 survey The Cost of Education found that some public schools on tight budgets had threatened to recoup costs through debt collectors, and excluded students unable to meet the costs of courses deemed discretionary. However, such courses, including woodwork and cooking, are often those that low income families valued as being pre-vocational, Flanagan says.

She hopes the state government's assistance will reverse the situation and send a strong message to other governments. But, she adds, this top-down, government-driven reform has not yet resulted in widespread cultural change.

Low income families continued to have difficulty getting their problems recognised in schools. “The groups and forums schools use to communicate with parents haven't changed at all.”

Many poverty experts believe better links between school and community could resolve the problem of low income parents feeling disenfranchised by school authorities.

Schools could build more partnerships with stakeholders such as local governments, and become more of a resource for the community at large, says Elspeth McInnes, an ACOSS executive board member, convenor of the National Council of Single Mothers and Their Children, and a teacher in early childhood at the University of South Australia. Schools would benefit from the community support, and communities “would come to see they have a real stake in their schools”.

Flanagan describes moves in Tasmania towards full service schools as a major step forward. “They have been really positive in getting parents of at-risk kids engaged in regular dialogues with schools.”

Marked with stickers

Stigmatisation of students in poverty was also flagged at the AEU forum. “I hear stories about SES (low socioeconomic status) kids' books being marked with bright orange stickers and wonder, 'How are we marginalising these people?'” says Flanagan.

Similarly, McInnes says singling out children in this way carries the risk of attracting the wrong kind of attention and perpetuating exclusion. “Labelling them like that entrenches a general understanding of poverty as 'less than'.”

Many forum attendees said a holistic approach to equity and disadvantage could resolve this. Schools need to take a 'whole-school approach' acknowledging that a fair proportion of users of the system would be on low incomes, says McInnes. And children in poverty often have related problems that a holistic approach is more likely to deal with. “Behavioural problems can emerge when a student's home life includes unemployment, housing problems, violence or illness. Teachers will have more awareness of the wider issues and place them in context.”

David Wynne, from the NSW Teachers Federation, stresses a holistic focus on educational outcomes, rather than isolated policies addressing areas of need, such as breakfast and clothing programs, and dealing with conflict and homelessness. “That means a whole-school approach to planning and development, high expectations by teachers of all students, and a resource base taking into account equitable provisions to schools in areas with a low socioeconomic status,” he says. The marginalisation of disadvantaged students is perpetuated by the federal government's ongoing agenda of testing and rewarding schools and teachers on the basis of student outcomes, says Wynne. “This doesn't take into account the resource inequality these students face.”

After lobbying from the NSWTF, the NSW government will next year phase in a general process to reduce class sizes, giving priority to schools with high concentrations of disadvantaged students. “This is helping address our concern that most disadvantaged students miss out because they don't get targeted with the additional resources they need to help get over the bar,” says Wynne.

AEU federal research officer Roy Martin says more governments need to target schools with high concentrations of students in need, and there have been some excellent examples of individual schools using the full service schools model. “It is time for governments, especially the Commonwealth government, to get behind this concept with well funded and researched pilot projects.”

The AEU, Martin says, hopes the development of a widely supported “fair go schooling” charter will result from the forum.

FIONA SEXTON is a freelance writer.