“Unlike every other State, we introduced a policy of ‘Local Schools, Local Decisions’, which means … funding is untied and that means the school community can decide where it is spent,” Member for Northern Tablelands Adam Marshall said on Monday Morning at Uralla Central School, when he announced $23.84 million in needs based Gonski funding for 59 Northern Tablelands public schools in 2019.
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He said the needs of our local schools all differed very much.
“The school community can decide where the funding can best help the students of the particular school. Needs will be as different in Armidale schools are they are in Bundarra, Inverell, Moree and Mungindi. As they should be because every community is different, every school is different and every student’s need are different.” Mr Marshall said.
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“We’ve been the only state to deliver Gonski in its most pure and true form. We have a purely needs based funding allocation right across all of our public schools, and it is transparent, you can see how it’s calculated and that process is very fine grained.”
As passionate advocate of Labor’s Gonski educations reforms, Mr Marshall said today’s announcement was an 8.1 per cent increase ($1.93 million) in for Northern Tablelands public schools.
“Because of that wonderful system we seen a huge increase in the Northern Tablelands, in fact, over the last five-years we’ve seen a $14.5 million recurrent funding increase for all of our public schools,” he said.
“I say recurrent because it is important to recognise this is not a one off sugar hit.
“This is the new benchmark or the new funding level for our public schools, and it gives principals like Michael Rathbourne here, certainty to invest in new programs to assist their students.”
“Schools are doing all sorts of good things with this funding,” he said.
Funding for some of our local schools included:
- Armidale City Public School $521,922
- Armidale Secondary College (Armidale High School) $730,634
- Armidale Secondary College (Duval High School) $715,578
- Ashford Central School $606,126
- Ben Venue Public School $555,927
- Black Mountain Public School $97,376
- Bundarra Central School $393,898
- Glen Innes High School $789,664
- Glen Innes Public School $910,462
- Glen Innes West Infants School $158,435
- Guyra Central School $821,242
- Inverell Public School $1,155,788
- Inverell High School $1,173,286
- Macintyre High School (Inverell) $892,456
- Uralla Central School $725,955
- Warialda High School $497,111
- Warialda Public School $383,516