Grants to sponsor students to take part in STEM events, activities and competitions

Government schools in New South Wales (NSW), South Australia (SA), Tasmania (TAS) and Western Australia (WA) are subject to their state education departments’ regulation on who may enter into agreements and sign or execute them.

You must include your relevant state or territory education department’s ABN as a Collaborator in your application in order to enter into a grant agreement, including street and postal addresses.

For identification purposes, enter your school’s ABN as the applicant and your legal entity’s ABN in the Collaborator section of your application with the following relevant state details:

• NSW: NSW Government School. ABN: 18 246 198 266 
• SA: The Minister for Education. ABN: 91 814 239 978
• TAS: Department of Education Tasmania. ABN: 26 237 631 294
• WA: Department of Education. ABN: 69 769 481 770

The School Principal in NSW, SA and TAS government schools are the authorised person to accept (execute) the grant agreement if your grant is approved for funding, When your application is approved, you must invite your School Principal into the application portal for this purpose when we issue the grant agreement.

For a WA government school, only an authorised representative from your state education department can accept (execute) the grant agreement.

The grant will be paid to your relevant state education department who is then responsible for transferring the funds to your school as outlined in sections 9.1 and 9.4 of the Grant Opportunity Guidelines.

You are not eligible to apply if you are an unincorporated association or entity.

A school that is an unincorporated entity must apply through a related incorporated entity. Before applying, check that your ABN is listed as incorporated via ABN Lookup. 

There are scenarios where your ABN is listed as unincorporated in ABN Lookup but your ABN/organisation was historically incorporated under a particular legislation. This scenario is most relevant to religious affiliated schools, for example: The Uniting Church in Australia Act 1976 provides incorporation evidence under section 34 – Certain bodies incorporated

If your ABN/organisation aligns to this scenario, you must provide evidence of incorporation to confirm eligibility. 

This can be attached to your application in the Application Finalisation page under supporting documentation. You may also enter reference text and/or a hyperlink for us to confirm that your organisation is incorporated for meeting eligibility requirements.

If evidence of incorporation is not provided and the ABN/organisation is listed as unincorporated in ABN Lookup, your application may be deemed ineligible.

You're not eligible to apply if you’re:

• an organisation, or your project partner is an organisation, included on the National Redress Scheme’s list of ‘Institutions that have not joined or signified their intent to join the Scheme’ 
• an organisation or your project partner is an organisation that has been named by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency as an organisation that has not complied with Workplace Gender Equality Act (2012)
• an individual
• a partnership
• an unincorporated association or entity
• any organisation not included in section 4.1 of the grant opportunity guidelines.
• a trust (however, an incorporated trustee may apply on behalf of a trust)
• a state, territory or local government agency or body (however, you may execute an agreement on behalf of a school that is not a legal entity and cannot enter into an agreement with the Commonwealth) 
• a non-corporate Commonwealth entity
• running the event, activity or competition which you are applying for students to attend.

Expenditure items that are not eligible are:

• expenditure incurred on past events
• business as usual events, including incursions or franchised in-house events 
• exchanges or visits to other schools
• salaries for the sponsor organisation or chaperone 
• administration costs incurred by the sponsor organisation or chaperone
• cost of applying for the grant
• costs incurred prior to submission of your application
• international travel expenses, to all countries except for New Zealand
• cost of materials for STEM activities or events.

We review applications against the eligibility criteria in the order which we receive them. We may ask for additional evidence to determine your eligibility. We can only recommend eligible applications for funding.

If we find unintentional errors in your application, we may contact you to correct or clarify the errors, but you can’t make any material alteration or addition.

Applications are accepted until the available funding for this grant opportunity is fully allocated or 25 January 2022, whichever occurs first.

The Program Delegate decides which grants to approve, taking into account the application assessment and the availability of grant funds.

 If your application is eligible, and there are funds available, you will receive a written offer of grant funding. Successful applicants must enter into a grant agreement with the Commonwealth. We will use an exchange of letters grant agreement.

The grant agreement has general terms and conditions that can’t be changed.

We will pay 100% of the grant on execution of the grant agreement. You must report how you spent the grant funds at the completion of the project.

Payments will be made by direct credit into a nominated bank account. Payments to government schools in NSW, SA, TAS and WA are made to their state education departments.