The Pay Gap Between States
Victorian school principal Jessica Sargeant is facing a significant challenge. Her teachers are consistently moving to New South Wales, where government school teachers receive better pay. Echuca College, which she leads, is located just across the border from Moama in NSW. The two states are separated by the Murray River and a considerable gap in salaries.
Ms Sargeant often recruits teaching graduates to start their careers at her school. However, retaining them proves difficult. “We mentor them, we support them through their teacher training, and then they get their qualification and say, ‘see you later, I’m going to NSW.’ She doesn’t blame them for leaving. A starting graduate public school teacher in Victoria earns $79,589 a year, which is more than $13,000 less than the $92,882 earned by a graduate public school teacher in New South Wales.
Over the past three years, Ms Sargeant has lost seven staff members due to salary differences and the cost of living. Some of these teachers moved to non-government schools, but she believes some would have stayed if government salaries in Victoria were not the lowest in the country.
The Decision to Cross the Border
For many teachers, moving to NSW is a no-brainer. Last week, tens of thousands of public-school teachers in Victoria went on strike to demand better pay from the state government. The latest offer—a 17 per cent wage increase over four years—still leaves Victorian teachers behind their counterparts in NSW.
Teacher Michael Rogers understands the appeal of higher wages in NSW. He taught at a government school in Wodonga, on the Victorian side of the border, for 10 years before taking a job at a Catholic school in Albury, NSW, in 2024. “Crossing the border didn’t really cross my mind until I got to that point where I was burning out,” Mr Rogers said. “The pressure and the stress that I was under in Victoria just became too much.”
The difference between Victorian pay and NSW pay for him in a leadership role was around $30,000. With a young family and a mortgage, it became a logical decision for him to move.
Low wages were only one aspect of underfunding that added to staff pressures when he taught in Wodonga. At times, his old school, which had around 60 teaching positions, was short by 20 teachers. “The only way we could work around that was for those teachers that had a class off, they’d have to do what we call an ‘extra’,” he explained. “Essentially what we were doing was giving teachers extra face-to-face time, which is extremely difficult. You cannot follow a curriculum and deliver decent and meaningful classes within an hour’s notice. It just became, and I hate to say, the babysitting service.”
The State of Education in Victoria
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan claims that the testing results from the state’s students demonstrate her government’s commitment to education. She strongly refutes criticisms that the state’s public schools are underfunded. “I’m going to disagree with that assessment both from the perspective of being the premier of the state that has the best NAPLAN results in the country, [and] being the premier of Victoria where we have increased funding to our government schools by 34 per cent over the past decade, the highest level of additional investment of any state and territory,” she stated.
However, Professor Ian Morgan from Save Our Schools argues that Victoria is an outlier when it comes to meeting its commitments under the Gonski reforms. “The Victorian government has always said ‘define Victoria as the education state,’ but they’ve always been the laggard in funding the government school sector in particular,” he said.
Every state and territory except Victoria has reached an agreement with the Commonwealth on how they will meet the Schooling Resource Standard by 2034 or earlier. Victoria’s current agreement only runs through 2026, with no further increases to state and federal shares for Schooling Resource Standard funding.
Funding Discrepancies
With the state and Commonwealth not increasing their shares of the Schooling Resource Standard, Professor Morgan says this means significant underfunding for Victorian schools. “The figures vary a little bit, but it’s certainly $3-4 billion,” he said.
Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll defends the state’s funding record, stating that the analysis is inaccurate because it doesn’t include other spending, such as building new schools. “When Gonski was first created many years ago, it was the recommendation from David Gonski that school infrastructure also be included in the equation when it comes to Schooling Resource Standard,” Mr Carroll said. “The Allan government has spent eighteen and a half billion on school infrastructure. None of that is including the [Schooling Resource Standard].”
However, Ms Sargeant points to the most recent Productivity Commission statistics, which show that Victoria’s average spending of $20,125 per student is more than $3,000 a year less than the $23,725 average spend in NSW. She believes underfunding is Victoria’s legacy when it comes to government schools. “They haven’t come to the party. They promise fair funding and it hasn’t happened,” she said. “Victorian students are [$3,600] less than NSW, but less than every state in Australia. What does that say about an education state and their support for their students?”
