Catholic schools.

Sandhurst Catholic Education office director Denis Higgins said they were glad the Liberals and Nationals had listened to the Catholic Education Office campaign to seek parity with the other states on government funding.

He said Bendigo's Catholic schools, which taught more than 400 students, were only funded by the state to a level of 16 per cent, trailing the 25 per cent offered by other states.

Mr Higgins said the inclusion of increased funding for the Catholic disability education sector and for capital works were pleasing parts of the Opposition response to the requests.

"We don't want state schools to get less, if anything they deserve increases, we are asking for a reasonable portion of the tax dollar paid by every parent.

"If you had two children with parents on the same income, why should one who goes one way to a Catholic school effectively get 15.8 cents of their tax dollar for education while the other at a government school gets 99 cents in a dollar?"

He said 30 per cent of the 18,000 students in the Sandhurst diocese were non-Catholic, while the last ABS census had shown the socio-economic status in 42

out of the 54 regions where they had schools had dropped.

Mr Higgins said keeping Catholic teachers on wages on parity with recent wage increases for state school teachers would result in reduced programs and fewer subjects.

He said the only other option would be to increase fees.

"How on earth can we ask the people of regional Victoria to pay more?"

The release of the Opposition document called Restoring The Balance also sparked a political fight about the issue.

Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu said Victorians who sent their children to Catholic schools were paying the highest fees in Australia after a decade of Labor neglect in which funding had dropped from 17.4 per cent to 15.1 per cent.

Nationals leader Peter Ryan said the new plan would reduce the pressure on the 20 per cent of families with children who attended Catholic schools in an age of spiralling household costs.

However, MP for Bendigo East Jacinta Allan said the government had put $420 million into the Catholic sector alone.

She accused the opposition of again miscalculating its promises by promising $90 million in 2009-10 when it was not even in power.