When Ana Mulipola and her husband, Walter, moved to Caroline Springs in Melbourne’s outer west 22 years ago, “it was literally just us”, she says. “We had no neighbours. It was a blank canvas.”
They hadn’t thought much about their future children’s education when they built their home in the greenfields development, but as the suburb has grown around them, so has their family. When the time came, they chose to send their three boys to a Catholic primary school.
“It started off being a family request,” Mulipola says, noting both she and her husband come from heavily religious backgrounds. “We both agreed that the kids would go to a Catholic primary school at the very least … [but] the one thing that has always made me back the decision to put them into a Catholic school is just that there is a common denominator. There’s common values.”
The Mulipolas are one of an increasing number of families opting to send their children to private school rather than public school – a trend most noticeable on the outer fringes of Australia’s major cities.
Data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in early March showed that the percentage of students enrolled in public schools has fallen to another record low. Enrolments in government schools grew by just 5% in the decade between 2016 and 2025, while Catholic school enrolments grew by 8% and independent school enrolments by 31%.
Emma Rowe, an associate professor of education at Deakin University, says this is largely the consequence of governments not meeting funding targets for public schools over a long period of time, while simultaneously funnelling large amounts of money to private schools.
While recurrent federal school funding is tied to a needs-based measure, capital funding is not. Private schools persistently and disproportionately benefit from commonwealth capital funding, recent research from the Australian Education Union shows. The average grant to those public schools that received capital funding in 2023 was $75,492 – equating to just under 7% of the average grant provided to private schools – $1,098,334.
The effect of capital funding “cannot be underestimated”, Rowe says, and such deep inequity “should be considered a national crisis”.
“The one big thing that gets parents in the door, absolutely without a doubt, is the buildings.
“They say it time and time again. They walked into that school and they were blown away by the gym facilities, or the football pitch, or the fact that it has a concert hall.”
Presenting schooling as a matter of parental choice is a problem because it turns a right into a commodity, she says. “Education shouldn’t be seen as a consumerist good because it’s too closely linked to social mobility, life outcomes, a healthy democracy.”
Two private, one public: three schools on the same block
The uptick in private school enrolments is sharpest in urban growth areas.
The city of Melton, where Caroline Springs is located, was the second-largest growth area for independent schools in the past year, with an additional 558 enrolments, according to analysis from Independent Schools Victoria. It was second only to the adjacent city of Wyndham, which saw 1,175 new students at independent schools. The Catholic education system, meanwhile, has seen 12% growth – or 247 enrolments – in Caroline Springs alone in the past five years, according to the Victorian Catholic Education Authority.
Since the development of Caroline Springs began in 1999, the population has grown to more than 24,000 people. But the peak growth period was between 2006 and 2011, when the number of residents almost doubled from 10,880 to 20,366, with a higher proportion of children under the age of 15 than the rest of the state.
This is when schools like Southern Cross Grammar – which caters for students from prep to year 12 – set up in the area.
Southern Cross emerged in 2011 from the ruins of ICA Melton College, which shut its doors in 2010 after only a few years of operation when its parent company, Independent Colleges Australia, collapsed. The school community sought assistance and found a benefactor in the late Zig Inge, a retirement home developer, with a grant from the Inge family allowing them to buy back the school and set it up as an independent not-for-profit.
The school has grown rapidly since then, from 46 students in 2011 to 930 this year. It will cap out at 980 students, says the principal, Brayden Stone.
“We’re only two years away from maximum numbers, which, as you can imagine, is a great problem to have,” Stone says. “But also, it is a problem for those in the local area that want access to independent schools.”
Southern Cross sits next to St George Preca primary, a Catholic school that has about 730 students – including one of Mulipola’s sons.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailThe same block is also home to a local public school, Springside Primary, which last year had 976 students enrolled.
Public schools are required to take students that fall within their catchment area; private schools have no such obligation.
The majority of students at Southern Cross live in Caroline Springs and the immediately adjacent suburbs, Stone says, but some come in from urban growth areas further afield such as Aintree and Cobblebank, and more established western suburbs such as Deer Park, St Albans and Keilor Downs.
For Tania Tkatchyk, who lives in nearby Taylors Hill, Southern Cross Grammar appealed due to its smaller size compared with other grammar schools, and the fact that it combines primary and secondary school.
“Walking into Southern Cross we were like, wow, that’s a great sense of community for a grammar school,” Tkatchyk says. “The teachers know a lot of the children by first name … the people are personable, and that there’s that strive for excellence.”
It costs Tkatchyk and her husband about $55,000 annually to send their four children to Southern Cross, which she acknowledges is “huge”.
Tkatchyk says it was important to her to provide the best level of education she could for her children. “We knew that we were able to provide that financially and it was a no-brainer for us really. We were like, you know, we want to give them the best opportunity, academically, that we can afford to give them … It is a really big decision. Do I ever regret it? Absolutely not.”
Mulipola says when her children got to high school, she gave them the choice to continue with a Catholic school or go to a public school. They chose the Catholic school.
“They thought, you know, we’ll just go where our friends are going,” she says. But with that came an agreement that the boys would “put in, education-wise”, as Catholic schooling costs the Mulipolas about $5,000 a year for each child.
“I said, ‘We’re not paying all this money for you to just muck around,’” Mulipola says.
Research conducted by Independent Schools Australia suggests word of mouth is the most significant influence on more than 53% of parents in all sectors in their choice of school. The 2021 online survey of 1,968 parents from all school sectors also indicated that when parents recommended independent schools, 54% did so on the basis of educational excellence.
When they didn’t recommend them, parents cited cost: school fees being the biggest issue (68%), followed by expense of additional activities or items (49%).
For some families, however, cost means public school is the only option. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds are overrepresented in public schools, a distribution that’s evident in that one block in Caroline Springs.
At Springside Primary, 27% of students are from the lowest, most disadvantaged quartile in the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s index of community socio-educational advantage. At the Catholic primary school, St George Preca, 19% of students are in the lowest quartile. At Southern Cross Grammar, it’s just 3% of students.
Trevor Cobbold, the national convener of Save Our Schools, says the results of the funding stagnation are clearly visible to parents.
“All the research around the world shows that money matters,” Cobbold says. “That makes a huge difference in terms of who you can employ and the material resources you can bring to bear in the classroom. People are not silly. They can see it, and they talk to other parents.”
