Every Australian child, no matter where they live, should have access to a world-class education.
The Liberal and Nationals Government has secured the funding and reforms necessary to ensure all Australian students can reach their potential – from early education, through school to vocational education and university.
We are doing this by:
• Delivering more affordable child care with out of pocket costs down 8.9% since our Child Care Package began.
• Investing in the early years by funding preschool to support 15 hours per week in the year before school.
• Investing $4.9 million to boost preschool attendance by the most disadvantaged children.
• Improving school student outcomes by providing record and guaranteed needs-based school funding - an extra $37 billion for all schools, an increase on average of 62% per student - and securing the agreement of every state and territory to our plan to lift student results.
• Supporting students with a disability through record and growing funding.
• Making a record investment in higher education - more than $17 billion each year with a renewed focus on regional Australia.
• Creating more than 80,000 new apprenticeships and investing more than $3 billion in annual funding for vocational education.
A re-elected Morrison Government will build on this record through:
• Investing $15 million for Teach for Australia to train high achieving teachers who will become high quality school leaders in rural, remote or disadvantaged schools.
• Investing $10.8 million to provide a Year 1 voluntary phonics health check for parents and teachers to ensure their children are not falling behind.
• Ensuring phonics is included in university teaching courses so that new teachers can use it in their classrooms.
• Working with state and territory governments on best practice policies on mobile phone use in classrooms.
• Tasking the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership to develop a National Strategy to support schools to tackle the abuse of teachers in the classroom.
• Pursuing a Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Education Council review to lift the burden of compliance and red tape, so teachers can focus on teaching, not paperwork.
• $15 million to create a further 5 Regional Study Hubs with additional Commonwealth Supported Places to support students to study their university course in their local communities.
• $2 million to expand the Country Education Partnership's successful Rural Inspire program, which aims to engage rural and regional students with further education.
Labor cannot be trusted with education.
The only time in the last decade that government school funding has been cut was under Labor.
When Labor was last in office, Bill Shorten as Education Minister cut $1.2 billion to schools through secret funding deals. In government Labor failed to provide ongoing or genuine needs-based school funding focussed on students. And announced $6.6 billion in cuts to higher education.
They cannot manage the Budget, putting at risk our real needs-based and record funding for schools.
Our plan is backed by our record.
Through our record investment in education, supported by a strong Budget and sensible reforms, the Morrison Government is committed to delivering the quality education that every Australian child deserves.
