The Australian Education Union has claimed that no public school in Tasmania would reach the school resourcing benchmark by 2023 under the current federal funding agreement with the states.
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About 80 AEU volunteers spoke with parents as they picked up their children at schools across the Bass electorate on Wednesday, seeking to highlight school funding discrepancies between the major parties.
The coalition's education funding plan included $308 billion from 2018 to 2029, strongly based on the Gonski 2.0 model, while Labor's plan had $14 billion more over the same period and was based more on the original school funding plan.
AEU president Correna Haythorpe spoke with parents at Exeter Primary School, which the AEU claimed would be $300,000 worse off over three years under the coalition model compared with Labor.
She said missing out on those additional funds would prevent schools from putting in place the required early intervention programs for students.
"That money can be used to invest in teaching, in educational support staff, and in learning programs for our children," Ms Haythorpe said.
"Here in Tasmania we see public school funding significantly below that of private schools.
"By 2023 not a single school in Tasmania will actually hit the Schooling Resource Standard, which is the benchmark for resources for our kids."
The school visits were part of an AEU campaign, launched in February, to target marginal seats across Australia in the lead-up to the election.
The union cited its own analysis which showed the vast majority of schools across Australia would meet the Schooling Resource Standard - the benchmark for resourcing - but that figure dropped off after the coalition made new funding deals with the states.
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Labor has flagged changes to the agreement, including a crackdown on states counting costs such as transport and capital depreciation as part of their education spend.
Tasmanian Liberal senator Wendy Askew said the AEU claims about school funding cuts were "completely false" because, in real terms, schools were getting more funding than they were before 2018.
"There have been no cuts to education funding, in fact funding for all public schools in Bass is increasing by around 43 percent per student over the next decade under the Coalition," she said.
Giving schools the resources they need should be the priority
Amanda McEvoy has three children attending Exeter Primary School, describing the teachers as "amazing" and that parents could not be happier with their efforts.
She attends the school to offer parent help, or assistance to teachers, when she has the opportunity.
Ms McEvoy said giving the school the resources to employ teacher support would be a benefit to students.
"We should have the resources to have teacher support so that our children are getting enough attention and the ability to actually learn, and the people around them to facilitate that happening," she said.
"I do think that we could have more hands on the ground. We suddenly get to the point where we get large school classes, and that's not great for anybody, especially in early childhood classes.
"We want to be able to keep those class numbers as low as possible, and we want to be able to see our parents being supported in every possible way."