The ‘Better and Fairer Schools Agreement’; fairer funding but not fair

Abstract

In 2024, the Australian Federal Labor Government announced the Better and FairerSchools Agreement 2025–2034, which sets policy, inter alia, for Australian school funding for the next ten years. This paper contributes to the critical policy analysis literature on school funding by undertaking a focused analysis of this recent policy, deploying a novel analytical framework. It explores and evaluates the likely impact of the BFSA on equity in funding allocations between the public and private school sectors. Our analysis indicates that the Australian private school sector operates an accumulation economy by which it is accreting resources and reputation to itself, at the expense of the public sector. We identify three interrelated dynamics of accumulation—extraction, mystification and depletion. In each category, the capacity of the BFSA to address these issues is evaluated. We conclude that, while under this new policy the funding system will be slightly fairer, it barely scratches the surface of Australia’s equity in funding issues.