NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli has slammed a federal Productivity Commission report into Australian schools as a waste of money.
"I hope no one paid for this report," Mr Piccoli said on Tuesday. "[Because] it tells us nothing that we didn't know four years ago."
The comments from the state Coalition minister come after the draft report from the commission found a 14 per cent increase in spending per student over the past decade had not improved academic results in the nation's schools.
The report was commissioned by Mr Piccoli's federal Coalition colleague Treasurer Scott Morrison in March.
It highlights four-year-old data on the declining performance of Australian students in the Programme for International Assessment up to 2012, and stagnating NAPLAN results up to 2015.
But Mr Piccoli claims the report only covers 1.5 per cent of the time under the Gonski funding agreement, which re-distributes funding to the state's most in-need schools from March 2014.
Mr Piccoli has continued to lobby his federal counterparts for the final two years of Gonski funding after Mr Morrison's federal budget in May fell $3 billion short of Labor's six-year Gonski commitment.
"I'm disappointed," said Mr Piccoli. "When [the federal government] sees a report like this, they see it as a justification for not funding the final two years of Gonski. They see this as vindication."
A spokesman for Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said the government would wait for the commission's final report, due in December, and then consider its response.
A spokeswoman for the Productivity Commission said the report could not be used to support or argue that funding is too low or too high.
"We are simply setting the scene of performance along expenditure as making the case for more to be done," she said.
Mr Piccoli said that the impact of the reforms would take years to be realised as resources shift from high SES to low SES schools.
"It takes eight years to build a train line. Even after you have spent $3 billion on it you don't get any passengers on it. It is the same with education," he said.
"If you target money to the right schools, you are going to get results."
On Tuesday, Productivity Commissioner Jonathan Coppel said the report did not downplay the importance of funding.
"Resources are important," he said. "But the way they are used and how to get the biggest bang for your buck depends on having strong research processes."
He said it was time to find out what good schools were doing, and replicate their methods across other schools.
with Henrietta Cook
