ACT schools are being shortchanged $19 million as they bear the burden of funding for cross-border students, Education Minister Andrew Barr says.
In his submission to the Gonski Review of Funding for Schooling, Mr Barr said the ACT Government was not receiving anywhere near enough reimbursement for educating students from NSW.
Figures from last year's census of ACT Schools showed nearly 5000 NSW students were enrolled in the capitals schools, accounting for 5per cent of all government enrolments and 12 per cent of those in Catholic and independent schools.
The Government receives adjustment funding of $12 million to cater for these students, but Mr Barr said the real costs were closer to $31million.
"When you do the figures, that $19million is equal to 3.3 per cent of our overall education budget, or a whole year's worth of new education initiatives," he said.
"We could provide more counsellors with that money, hire more ESL (English as a second language) teachers, we could do any number of things with that kind of funding."
Mr Barr said the shortfall placed the ACT education sector under immense pressure and played a large role in the proposed closure of 39 schools in 2006.
"In some of those schools, over 90per cent of enrolments came from NSW, meaning those schools ran under heavy subsidisations from the ACT taxpayer," he said.
The cross-border funding formed a key part of a submission that highlighted greater autonomy and accountability as priorities for a new national funding formula.
Mr Barr pushed for states and territories to be given greater flexibility in allocating resources and said the last thing he wanted was a complete Commonwealth takeover of funding and services.
But the most significant issue for the ACT was the creation of a new funding system that did not rely so heavily on student postcodes.
Mr Barr said the socio-economic status model introduced by the Howard government in 2001 simply did not fit the ACT system because of a scattered distribution of poor and wealthy families.
"The key example I always give is the postcode 2603, which takes in the suburbs of Red Hill and Forrest," Mr Barr said.
"This is one of the richest postcodes in Australia, but it also contains quite a number of disadvantaged families in public housing and rentals.
"I have to raise these examples in virtually every discussion Ive had with education ministers, because more often than not funding is aggregated across postcodes and the ACT misses out, yet we know we have pockets of disadvantage."
Mr Barr nominated a new system based on the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) - a score that ranks families according to their parents' job and educational attainment rather than the suburb where they live.
Mr Barr's submission also called for rewards for innovation and best practice, funding to re-engage disengaged students, for disability funding to be allocated according to the level of individual need and for schools to be held more accountable for the distribution of disability funding and and corresponding student outcomes.
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