As families struggle with rising back to school costs, the Greens have called on Labor to adopt their $800 back to school payments plan, and bring forward their funding commitments for public education to offer direct cost of living relief to families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A new study from Finder released on Wednesday<\/u><\/a> found parents are spending thousands of dollars on back to school costs each year, including from \u2018voluntary\u2019 fees in public schools. On average, it costs $2,847 to send a child to primary school per year, and $5,310 in secondary school. Almost 1 in 3 families in Finder\u2019s study say they can\u2019t afford back to school costs and will have to go into debt, use last year\u2019s supplies\/hand me downs, or they kids will go without.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around 1 in 6 Australian children are now living in poverty (or more than 950,000 children), according to the 2025 Child Poverty in Australia Report<\/u><\/a> (pg8).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the next decade, public schools in Australia will be short-changed by $34 billion in funding<\/u><\/a>, despite the government\u2019s claims of fully funding schools. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Shortfalls in public funding mean parents continue to pay thousands of dollars in fees and classroom expenses just for their kids to attend public school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At last year\u2019s federal election, the Greens took a plan for $800 back to school payments made to families at the start of the school year for each child attending a public school, to help meet growing out of pocket costs, and a $6.8 billion plan for full funding to save public schools, funded by making big corporations pay their fare share of tax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rising cost of public education and increasing child poverty rates show that existing cost of living support is not enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Greens spokesperson for Primary and Secondary Education, Senator Penny Allman-Payne:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBack to school costs are just getting higher and higher every year because Labor and the Liberals are short-changing public schools by billions and shifting the costs onto parents.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAustralian families should be able to expect a free public education, instead they have ever-higher fees and charges and extensive back to school shopping lists that can add up to thousands of dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWith 1 in 3 big corporations paying no tax, and almost a million children in Australia living in poverty, something is seriously wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen I was a public school teacher, like so many of my colleagues, I regularly spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to dip into my own salary to give students the resources they need, and I know parents do the same.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf Labor wanted to stop families from having to pay thousands in school fees, they would implement full funding of schools now, and help struggling families with $800 direct cash back to school payments as the Greens plan has proposed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEvery child deserves a free, world-class public education, and that\u2019s what the Greens are committed to delivering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As families struggle with rising back to school costs, the Greens have called on Labor to adopt their $800 back to school payments plan, and bring forward their funding commitments for public education to offer direct cost of living relief to families. A new study from Finder released on Wednesday found parents are spending thousands of dollars … Continue reading “Greens urge $800 \u2018back to school\u2019 payments as new figures show cost of living support for families is not enough”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aussie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36908"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36909,"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36908\/revisions\/36909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}