Pearls and Irritations

Both in Australia and the UK, governments are moving to clean up the damage of the privatisation era. But in Australia’s school sector, far from being over, privatisation is gathering pace.

The Commonwealth’s entry as a significant player in schools funding during the 1970s transformed the shape and composition of the school system, through promoting a net transfer of student enrolment share from public schools to independent private schools. This has been accompanied by an exchange of students from low- and middle-income families between the public and Catholic and, increasingly, other “low fee” schools.

Australia’s school system stands out in comparison with OECD countries but not in a good way. It now works to increase the concentration of disadvantaged students in disadvantaged schools at a rate second to only one other country!

There has been no serious challenge to evidence provided in the 2023 report, Improving Outcomes for All, commissioned by the Albanese government, that the extent of this ‘residualisation’ in Australian schools is leading to poorer learning outcomes, especially for students experiencing disadvantage.

In a 4-year snapshot (2018 – 2022), this report also shows almost 30 per cent of public schools with concentrations of socio-economically disadvantaged students and fewer than 10 per cent with concentrations of advantage. Conversely, independent schools have only six per cent of schools with concentrations of the socio-economically disadvantaged and almost 30 per cent with concentrations of the advantaged. As long ago as 2007, Cardinal George Pell acknowledged that Catholic schools were no longer serving their previously high proportion of poorer families. Fewer than four per cent now have concentrations of the disadvantaged and almost 12 per cent have concentrations of the advantaged.

There are many factors outside the sphere and influence of education policies that contribute to socio-economic divides between schools and that predispose some schools to being ‘strong’ in the market while others are ‘weak’. These factors include a complex mix of economic change, patterns of affluence in society generally and in specific communities, changing real estate values, trends in the birth rate and in patterns of immigration and settlement.

But education policy itself is seriously amiss when a school system requires public funding to compensate for inequities being produced by the system itself; which keeps adding to the share of the ‘heavy lifting’ borne by schools in an under-funded public sector; and where the fastest growth is occurring in a generally over-funded independent school sector with its concentrations of advantage. 

The time has come for an urgent reality check. To go on accepting an unfair and substandard school system as a fait accompli is a risk to the health of our democracy. Australians need to stand back and to focus more clearly on how our school system works in the here and now.

It is time to ask fundamental questions about the role of government when, as reported in the recent report, A Decade of Inequity, from the Australian Education Union, “a decade of special deals and transitional funding arrangements for private schools, in combination with the entrenched underfunding of 98% of public schools, has resulted in more than 56% of private schools receiving more government funding than public schools of similar size that educate very similar cohorts of students, an increase from 45% in 2013.”

The stockpile of reports, articles and essays about the mix of irrational and contradictory arrangements over the past five decades, which has brought us to our current situation, has produced more consensus about what is going wrong than about how to fix it.

My worst fear, now, in the absence of political leadership and action, is that those of us who have contributed to these texts may have added unintentionally to a process of ‘normalising’ the status quo. Might we have helped to accustom, to desensitise and to inure the Australian community to the damage caused by double-standards and defects in the design and operation of our school system?

Right now, many families are experiencing a cost-of-living crisis. At the same time, we have a critical shortage of school teachers. That these problems are being experienced worldwide only underlines the need for governments to take them seriously.

In these circumstances, it makes no sense for a democratic country to have its school system set on cruise control to maintain the steady expansion of our already large number of non-government schools – schools with private admission fees that put them beyond the reach of many families. And this is certainly not the time for democratic governments to be sponsoring the placement of a growing share of the teaching force in these schools.

There are many schools in this country where students are thriving, where teachers and students have the resources and conditions they need to do their best work. But there are too many schools, disproportionately in the public sector, where students are missing out on the teaching support they need to access the full range and depth of the school curriculum. In these schools, students are being denied access to certain subjects; or are taught by teachers working outside their own area of qualifications and expertise; or in overly large classes. Some private school authorities in NSW have already announced their intention to raise school fees to give them an edge over public schools in attracting teachers, following a pay increase for teachers in NSW public schools last year.

The case for damage control. It will require longer-term action to develop a better and fairer system for planning, funding and regulating our schools. But urgent action is needed to avoid making things worse. The following actions could and should be taken without disrupting the education of students currently enrolled in schools.

Public funding priority. At this time when many Australian families with school-age children are experiencing financial stress – and pending the achievement of the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) by all schools – governments must give priority to investing taxpayer funds in teachers and facilities where they can be accessed by students from all families: that is, in public schools.

Set private school enrolment caps pending a serious review of the effects of current funding mechanisms.  Governments should cap the number of private school places at their current levels. In this scenario, the current level of public funding to private schools would be maintained. Schools would be able to replace graduating students with new entrants within their enrolment cap. (Provision could be made for recently established schools, where necessary, to have their current enrolment limit adjusted to allow students already enrolled in the earlier grades to complete their full 7 years of primary or 6 years of secondary schooling.)

Teacher supply and distribution. The Commonwealth should make its grants to private schools contingent upon immediate agreement by states and territories – as a condition of registration – that these school authorities set their teacher salaries and conditions in strict accordance with the relevant industrial awards and agreements.

Politics. Damage control may be urgent, but it will not be easy to achieve given the reality that the politics of schools funding is one of Australia’s most ‘wicked problems’. We can feel some sympathy for the Albanese Government, with its small parliamentary majority, for judging it too risky politically even to take up a Productivity Commission recommendation to remove deductible gift recipient status from donations to private school building funds, given the combined wealth and influence of their backers.

Across the world, there are signs of the fragility of democracy, and of the risks of simply taking democracy for granted. Education is a public, a positional and a private good. But the core business of government in a democracy is to maintain and advance education as a public good.

In Australia’s school system, the political commitment to ‘no one held back’ is now being privileged by governments over the commitment to ‘no one left behind’.

There is a very real risk that this progressive privatisation of schooling is weakening the capacity of the school system to provide families with opportunities to strengthen their ties with their neighbours at the local level; and fortifying one that sifts and sorts students according to differences in culture (including religion and ethnicity ) as well as income.

There is a particular obligation, in my view, for all those adult Australians who have benefited personally from their own public schooling to use that education to think rationally about the significance of public education and its place in our society.

Why would we want to undermine the opportunity for our future citizens to develop their practical understanding of what they share in common with their fellow students and of how to make socially responsible decisions about dealing with their differences?

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