22nd Jun 2017, 8:55 PM – Senate Australian Education Amendment Bill 2017 - in Committee - Setting SES

The majority voted in favour of keeping items 3, 41 and 42 of the bill unchanged. This vote took place after Victorian Senator Jacinta Collins (Labor) introduced an amendment to oppose those items. In explaining her reasoning, she said that:

These amendments deal with retaining the minister's ability to set SES for a group of schools and maintaining the existing primary capacity-to-contribute curve. We have canvassed this issue several times already during the debate on this bill, so I will attempt to cover a range of key points fairly quickly to reinforce the discussion that has already occurred. Because the SES scores do not seem to accurately assess the ability of school communities to pay fees and changes to the primary capacity-to-contribute curve, many low-fee systemic schools and indeed catholic schools will be hard hit. The government's bill assumes that primary parents are able to contribute more to fees than is currently the case.