The ACT government has spoken with Australia's reporting authority about how disadvantage is measured in Canberra as local education bodies put pressure on the federal government to rethink how school funds are distributed.
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The Education Directorate has told Auditor-General Maxine Cooper it held discussions with the Australian Curriculum, Reporting and Assessment Authority on how socio-educational advantage is measured in the ACT.
Canberra's relatively high ratings on the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage scale are often linked with the territory's comparatively good NAPLAN results.
However, a report by Dr Cooper released last week found that Canberra public schools come up short when compared with their counterparts interstate.
Multiple bodies have previously argued that disadvantage is hidden in Canberra because of its salt and pepper public housing policy.
The directorate said: "There is some evidence to suggest that ICSEA values in the ACT are skewed relative to other states and territories.
"[This] may form the basis of further exploration."
Canberra's unique housing mix has also formed the basis of much of the criticism of the federal government's nationally consistent needs-based funding policy.
The Association of Independent Schools of the ACT has acknowledged the "severe" impacts immediate funding cuts will have on some Canberra private schools in a submission to a senate inquiry on school funding changes.
For schools currently funded below the School Resourcing Standard, an immediate "or at the very least much shorter" transition period would be beneficial, the submission stated.
"The nature of ACT demographics is different to a lot of other cities, and compounds the effect of the impact," the submission read.
"Calculating a school's SES score relies on the residential addresses of the students at the school. In a city like Canberra, where planning policy decisions in the past have resulted in a very homogeneous society, SES scores may not indeed reflect the true fabric of a school's community.
"This means many independent schools have been able to maintain a reasonably low fee structure which has enabled students from low socio economic families to attend. These students will be collateral damage in the adoption of the new model."
Blue Gum Community School executive director Maureen Hartung has told the senate inquiry that finding an alternative to the socio-economic standard funding model must be an urgent priority for the government.
Her school has been at the bottom of the "funding cliff" for 16 years and forced to offer staff lower salaries and less favourable terms as a result of needs-based funding, she said.
"Our reality at present is that our students are receiving approximately half the funding subsidy of students at neighbouring Catholic and independent schools," she wrote.
"We would argue for an improved version of the ERI (Educational Resource Index, a formula in which schools were given a score based on their total private income divided by their number of students) as offering a much more equitable and genuinely needs-based school funding model, as it is based on a school's actual income and resources."
The Catholic Education Office Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, which has publicly denounced the model, is yet to make a submission to the senate inquiry.
