I added an exclusions block to the spring-batch-core to exclude spring-core, spring-beans, spring-aop, spring-context and spring-tx, then I added those dependencies with version 3.0.5.RELEASE.

This worked, but the dependency tree was not showing up properly in STS's pom viewer (spring-batch-core was not showing up as dependent on spring framework 3.0.5).
THEN, I deleted the exclusions block. The old version 2.5.6 spring framework dependencies didn't come back, and the dependency tree is now ok with spring-batch-core showing dependencies with 3.0.5.

Don't know if STS is the issue here... I'm on STS 2.5.2.RELEASE...