Schools PISA insights show urgent need for better schools funding
Initial results from the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) were released in December 2023. Whilst the usefulness of the PISA attainment results has been thrown into question by revelations that most students weren’t really trying on the tests (see the Save Our Schools website for more), PISA data is still useful in revealing how inequitably resources are distributed across schools in Australia.
PISA data is also useful in capturing students’ attitudes towards schooling and how this relates to other student and school characteristics.
PISA’s survey for school principals asks a series of questions about staff shortages and other educational resources and combines the answers into scales that have an international mean of 0 and a standard deviation of one. The higher the score, the greater the shortages.
Unsurprisingly, the data shows that government secondary school students are overwhelmingly in schools that have greater shortages of staff and other resources in comparison to those in Catholic and independent schools.
As a part of the staff shortage index, principals were asked to what degree their school’s capacity to provide instruction was hindered by a lack of teaching staff. Figure 2 (top, right) shows that the schools with much lower scores on PISA’s index of economic, social and cultural status (ESCS) were hindered ‘a lot’ by a lack of teaching staff. In other words, schools educating students from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds are not only the most under-resourced, they have also been the hardest hit by teacher shortages.
A similar pattern was found when principals were asked whether instruction was hindered by a lack of physical infrastructure such as buildings, grounds, heating and cooling (Figure 3, below). Again, those schools catering for students with the highest needs are the most hindered by a lack of adequate infrastructure.
The survey of Australian principals also shows that learning among low ESCS students is most hindered by teachers not able to meet individual student’s needs as a result of staff shortages.
PISA data clearly shows why genuine needs-based funding for schools is required urgently. Students in public schools need the basic level of funding determined by the Schooling Resource Standard, at a minimum, and they need it now.
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