Govt announces funding boost for schools

The federal government's claim that its My School website helped identify struggling
schools for extra funding is "disingenuous", the Australian Education Union (AEU)
says.
Education Minister Julia Gillard on Sunday announced that 110 schools with poor
maths and English results would share in $11 million over one year to help them
improve academically.
She said Labor's My School website, which compares institutions' literacy and
numeracy scores to others considered statistically similar and to the national
average, was used to identify the beneficiaries.
"Because we've now got the My School website, we've got more information than we've
ever had before about how Australian schools are going," Ms Gillard told the Nine
Network.
"These are the kind of schools that would have missed out if we hadn't had this new,
rich resource of information."
The money is additional to the government's $2.5 billion Smarter Schools National
Partnerships program, which includes $540 million to improve student literacy and
numeracy and $1.5 billion over seven years to 2014-15 for low socio-economic
schools.
AEU federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said Labor was wrong to try to tie the
extra funding to the recently-launched My School website.
"The suggestion that schools needed to be publicly ranked in order to allocate
additional government funding is disingenuous," he told AAP.
"That's demonstrably so, given that the money for the low socio-economic status
partnership had already been announced based on data governments' have got."
Mr Gavrielatos said he was concerned schools were being chosen for funding on the
basis of My School's "flawed" Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage
(ICSEA), which informs the statistically similar school comparisons on the site.
Its accuracy has been criticised for listing small public schools next to elite
private institutions.
"It appears this announcement has been made on the basis of the ICSEA which has
already been exposed as being totally inadequate and flawed," he said.
"We have much more confidence in the identification of (struggling) schools by
departments' and governments' around the country."
However, Mr Gavrielatos said, although $11 million split between 110 schools only
equated to a "very small" amount each, any extra funding was welcome.
Meanwhile, NSW Premier Kristina Keneally praised the My School website for shedding
light on which schools needed more help.
"One of the great benefits of the My School website is the transparency it provides
for governments and the community," she said.
"It will lead to targeted help to the kids that need it most."