The federal election was held on Saturday 21 May with Anthony Albanese elected Australia's 31st Prime Minister. The new parliament and cabinet are still being finalised. An appointment for the Minister for Education has not been made at this time.
During the election, Catholic education, in collaboration with Catholic School Parents Australia, engaged with the major political parties and candidates in some electorates, to highlight the key priorities for our school communities. These are:
Supporting school choice
Support for Catholic schools to be an affordable choice for Australian families through:
- Funding certainty by continuing the 10-year agreement and the current level of indexation to reflect increasing educational costs
- Refining loadings for student need, school size, regional and remote location
- Maintaining the Choice and Affordability Fund
- Advancing the review of the Capacity to Contribute formula to 2024 to ensure fairer parent contributions
- Improving capital funding support to adequately resource learning environments
Enabling faith-based education
- Appropriate legislation and educational policy to enable Catholic schools to operate and teach within a religious ethos
Delivering national priorities
- Extending the Non-Government Reform Support Fund beyond 2022 to support the delivery of the National Education Reform Agreement and emerging priorities such as quality teaching
- Supporting Early Childhood Education in the two years prior to school, capital funding to grow the number of services, and improved alignment for school delivery
- Better access to Mental Health and Wellbeing programs to address the increasing challenge of student mental health and wellbeing, particularly for educationally disadvantaged students
- Better access for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Catholic schools to Closing the Gap initiatives that support the complex needs of students
Major parties report card and responses to Catholic education priorities
Catholic education has released a pdf federal election report card (118 KB) assessing the pdf policy responses (156 KB) from the major political parties on education priorities.
The report card assess the Coalition, Labor and Green’s responses to the priorities of:
- Genuine school choice through fair funding and ensuring affordable contributions from families
- Enabling faith-based education through religious protections
- Improving capital funding
- Support for delivering national priorities such as quality teaching, early childhood education, mental health and wellbeing programs and Closing the gap initiatives for Aboriginal and Torres Islander students
- pdf Catholic education 2022 federal election report card (118 KB)
- pdf Catholic education 2022 federal election major party policy responses (156 KB)
- pdf Liberal-National Coalition full policy reponse (334 KB)
- pdf Australian Labor Party full response (135 KB)
Authorised by J Collins, National Catholic Education Commission, Level 3, 156 Gloucester Street, Sydney.