Tolley Anne: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Tolley Anne: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:648;Page:17505] 
ANNE TOLLEY (National—East Coast) 
: 
 The Minister of Education came before the Education and Science Committee and we questioned him at length about the Government’s proposed policy Schools Plus. For the benefit of members this was announced with a big fanfare at the beginning of the year by the Prime Minister. This was a major launch of a major policy. It is listed in the statement of corporate intent and it is listed in the preamble to the Budget as one of the Government’s priorities. In fact it is here in the statement of intent as one of four particular strategies aimed at getting young people to participate and achieve in education. Somewhere in all that fanfare we heard the figure of $170 million; so it was not an insignificant project. When the Budget came out we looked for the details of the expenditure and I have to say that we looked in vain. 
The first document that came to the select committee was the standard questionnaire that comes from the Finance and Expenditure Committee. It asked the ministry to explain all significant changes to existing policies all new policies and to detail any reprioritisation of outputs from within current baselines. So we thought we would see the first tranche of funding for this major initiative called Schools Plus outlined in this document but there was nothing no mention of it and no detail of any expenditure—nothing. It is a $170 million project but it does not even rate as one of the new policies. 
So then we looked to the wider Budget document and we were very pleased to see that in that document there was some mention of Schools Plus. That was good. Again we looked to see where the funding was. We saw that it would be funded out of a number of appropriations. So we have things like strategic leadership in the sector support and resources for education providers strategic leadership in the tertiary system support and resources for teachers interventions for target student groups school property portfolios and support and resources for the community. But when we turn to all of those pages we look in vain because no dollars are listed for Schools Plus. There is no money and no indication of what has dropped out of baseline expenditure in order to fund the areas described in the Budget for this major policy initiative which is worth approximately $170 million. There is no indication of how that $170 million is to be made up and no indication of how that figure was even arrived at. 
We asked the Minister what the story was because we expect to see over the next 12 months some indication of expenditure. The Minister said: “As costs develop and they haven’t yet because we have had only the very initial conversations around it and we’ve had ministry officials travelling about doing that we will meet it from new funds not from existing funds.” I say to the Minister that we were asking about both because neither was specified in the Budget from either existing baselines or any new funds being made available for this major initiative—this revolution that was described to us. 
Actually we did establish through the other questions that we asked of the ministry that some funds had been expended and were to be expended. In fact we found that in the coming financial year $668500 worth of expenditure was to be incurred. Most of that was to be for personnel—half a million dollars for personnel. I put it again to the Minister here in the Committee that this is a policy that was developed on the fly because National came out with a fantastic policy release that found pretty much universal favour. The Government had to come up with something pretty quickly. It worked through it quickly and in March it put a discussion document around all the schools because there was no information.