Ending the capital funding divide in Australias schools
23 February 2023
This report details how for over a decade the Commonwealth government has been derelict in its duty to ensure that students in Australia’s public schools have access to the buildings, and equipment and learning environments they need to thrive. It will show how capital investment in Australia’s public schools has been erroneously and deliberately dismissed by successive Commonwealth Coalition governments from 2013 onwards as a state responsibility, and how capital funding programs that exclude public schools by design, in conjunction with Commonwealth school funding settings that allow the mass reallocation of recurrent funding to capital works for private schools, have led to a situation where the vast majority of Australia’s 6,700 public schools are in dire need of urgent capital improvement and investment for future student enrolment growth.
