Commonwealth funding
ASV
Redistribution of Commonwealth Recurrent Grants
Redistribution of Commonwealth Recurrent Grants
Background
Adventist Schools Victoria (ASV) receives Commonwealth recurrent school funding on behalf of its schools as the approved system authority for those schools. Recurrent funding received from the Commonwealth Department of Education must be used to provide school education at a school.
Funding is predominantly used for a school’s day-to-day operations, including for teacher and other staff salaries. In addition to salaries and staff-related costs, schools also incur operating costs for expenses such as professional development, development of teaching materials, building maintenance, purchasing capital equipment for the school and other general operating expenses. Considerable costs are also incurred to implement school programs such as programs that target identified learning needs, provide extension opportunities and support disadvantaged students.
ASV Head Office
In addition to incurring expenses at its schools, ASV also incurs operating costs for its head office such as salaries for head office staff, recruitment, professional development and administrative costs. The head office provides direct support, specialist advice and administrative services to schools in areas such as finance and accounting, human resources and payroll, information communications technology, occupational health and safety, child protection, and spiritual and pastoral care. ASV also manages enterprise risk and compliance, with the CEO accountable to the ASV board of directors.
Applicability
The redistribution of Commonwealth recurrent school funding will apply from 2023.
See updated policy HERE.
Procedure
The previous needs-based funding arrangement was in place from 2020 to 2022 in response to changes made to the Australian Education Act that saw the SES (Socio-economic status) being replaced by the DMI (Direct Measure of Income) as a means to calculate the CTC (Capacity to Contribute) scores of non-government schools. ASV made a commitment to its schools that they will be no worse off, in funding terms, under the new DMI policy settings. To this end, ASV made the decision that it would use its own needs-based funding arrangement from 2020 until 2022, which would result in each school continuing to transition to 80% of the SRS by 2020. This needs-based arrangement ensured that students with the same level of need received the same level of funding support from the Commonwealth. With all schools having transitioned to 80% of SRS by 2022 there was now a need for ASV to establish a new needs-based funding arrangement for the purpose of distributing commonwealth recurrent funding to its schools.
