Better Fairer Schools Agreement (BFSA)
The Australian and Northern Territory (NT) Governments signed the first bilateral Better Fairer Schools Agreement (BFSA) on 31 July 2024, agreeing to fully and fairly fund all NT schools by 2029.
The BFSA commences on 1 January 2025 and is made up of a 10 year national Heads of Agreement, and 5-year NT Bilateral Agreement, with total funding of nearly $1.1 billion.
The agreement commits the NT to implement shared national reforms that build on existing efforts to enhance:
- Equity and excellence: improve outcomes and address student needs, especially for equity cohorts, and reduce concentrations of disadvantage in schools.
- Wellbeing for learning and engagement: ensure all students and staff feel supported and belong.
- Workforce: grow and diversify a workforce of confident and capable teachers and educators, and provide support to strengthen their practice and collaboration.
Under the agreement, the Australian Government will invest an additional estimated $737.7 million from 2025 to 2029 in NT government schools and the NT Government will invest an additional estimated $350 million over the same period for all NT schools.
For NT government schools, this will mean:
- Enhanced support for students
- Expanded remote secondary provision
- Whole school approaches to wellbeing and inclusion
- Increased resourcing for schools
- Funding certainty for schools
- More educators and support staff in schools
- Genuine partnerships with community
- Early years phonics and numeracy checks.
The NT has committed to improvement measures, including:
- Increasing the proportion of students with Year 12 (or equivalent) certification by 7.5 percentage points
- Increasing Aboriginal employee numbers
- Increasing NT’s overall student attendance rate to 79.7%
- Improving proficiency levels for reading and numeracy by 10%.
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