To truly understand claims about school funding, we have to consider the major flaw of the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS), against which funding arrangements are measured.
The Gonski-derived federal government framework for “fully funding” public and private schools, the SRS, is “sector blind”, which might be politically attractive and have some apparent logic, but denies the empirical reality of Australia’s dual schooling structure. There are qualitative differences between public and private schools, which have major implications for real costs and financial needs — and profound implications for Australian society.
Public schools have responsibilities and constraints, while the private sectors have concomitant freedoms and power. The larger the proportion of students in private schools, the greater the impact on the public sector. Private schools can select and exclude students, while public schools must accept all comers — including students who are disruptive and difficult or expensive to teach, who are excluded from private schools.
As well as being selective in various ways, many private schools provide scholarships (often with public support through tax-deductible funding) that deplete other (mostly public) schools of promising students. These are the students who would contribute to positive learning school cultures, be role models, and make up critical masses for specialist curricular and extracurricular programs.
Private schools are also mostly free to maintain optimal enrolment numbers, even when a locality experiences enrolment fluctuations because of fluctuations in population age cohorts or policies such as changes in school starting age.
Consequently, as enrolment data repeatedly shows, the public sector bears much more than its proportional share of costly enrolment fluctuations, leading to either overcrowded, difficult-to-manage schools with a lack of adequate facilities, or under-enrolment with reduced staffing and curriculum options and underutilised facilities. Private schools can also choose school locations, avoiding costly rural and remote locations or suburbs they consider less desirable.
The public sector also bears the high financial, educational and administrative costs of developing new teachers. Private schools mostly recruit selected teachers from the public system, taking little responsibility for the induction and development of graduate teachers — something leading education administrator and policy adviser Gregor Ramsey reported on at length more than 20 years ago. This is an especially serious problem for public schools in times of a general teacher shortage.
Private schools have very powerful lobbies to advance their particular interests. There have been many instances of the success of these lobbyists over the past half century — the latest being the Labor government’s rejection of the well-argued recommendation of the Productivity Commission’s philanthropy report to end tax deductibility for school building funds. Hidden public funding via tax expenditures is not for a charitable cause, by any stretch of the imagination! By contrast, public school authorities are state governments, which must serve many other constituents (including private school communities) with the severe constraint of vertical fiscal imbalance.
None of these highly cost-relevant factors is incorporated in the “sector blind” SRS framework.
This pattern of favoured treatment of private schools is not new — it was established in early colonial times. As journalist David Marr reported in Killing for Country:
While working in tandem to block the plans of two governors [in the 1830s] to educate every child in the Colony, [Marr’s ancestor’s sponsor and wealthy wool-grower and merchant, Richard] Jones and [Anglican Archbishop] Broughton collaborated on the mighty task of founding the King’s school in Parramatta to educate the sons of the gentry [and ensuring its public funding from the British Colonial Office].
