The 1973 Karmel report and the 2011 Gonski report helped drive Australia’s internationally exceptional private school ascendency.

One reason is their failure to account for fundamental differences between school sectors that create great costs for the public sector and benefits for the private sector. Yet these two reports are highly regarded by many, especially supporters of public education.

I explain this paradox in my article, ‘ The Australian private school ascendancy: origins, development and future", in Australian Educational Researcher, and summarise it here.

A principle underlying these reports is that federal government funding of schools should be sector blind, meaning that the funding standard should make no substantive distinction between public and private schools. While the term was not used in either report, Ken Boston, a co-author of the Gonski report, noted that “sector blind” was an accurate description of that report’s recommendations of “needs-based funding applied to all individual schools regardless of the sector of schooling to which they belong”. Both reports’ recommendations shaped government policies from the 1970s until today.

There is apparent logic (and political convenience) in assuming that costs are the same for educating equivalent children in either the public or private sector. Yet, this denies the empirical reality of the inherent differences between the sectors, which can be summarised as public schooling’s responsibilities to the whole community and the private sector’s freedoms and responsibilities only to their chosen clienteles and politically powerful auspicing organisations. In addition, there is vertical fiscal imbalance (states’ fiscal constraints and federal fiscal ease) and the private school sector’s great political and social advocacy power, contrasting with the responsibilities of states to all their constituents, including private schools.

Since the 1970s these factors have led to the ascendancy of the private school sector and residualisation of the public sector. Easily measurable evidence for private sector ascendancy includes high and increasing shares of total enrolments and of advantaged students, and high and increasing levels of public funding, which has led to much higher levels of per student funding than public schools enrolling apparently similar students.

Private freedoms, public responsibilities

The private sector’s substantial advantages in the teaching labour market are notable in the development of new teachers and when there are teacher shortages. The public sector disproportionately bears the costs of graduate teachers’ reduced teaching loads, the time of supervision and the costs to students of being taught by inexperienced teachers. The private sector can then recruit effective, fully qualified teachers from the public sector. Where there are specialist or general teacher shortages, the private sector can use its greater resources and administrative freedom to recruit from the public sector, ensuring optimal staffing while leaving the public sector to disproportionately bear the burden of shortages.

The larger the private sector relative to the public sector, the greater the damage inflicted on the public sector by the private sector’s competitive advantages in the teaching labour market. This has parallels in student enrolments.

Private schools can optimally manage enrolments while public schools must accept all comers or cope with too few. This common experience makes it costly for public schools to operate while private schools in the same locality can generally ensure optimal enrolments for efficient and effective schooling. The differences between the sectors are most obvious at times of national, state or local substantial enrolment change. In each time and place, the public sector has borne the costs of disruption and being underutilised or overcrowded.

The period of greatest national enrolment change occurred after decades of rapid enrolment growth ended in the late 1970s, falling to around zero until the mid-1990s. Many localities experienced substantial, costly enrolment declines. Costs were overwhelmingly borne by the public sector, where national enrolments fell by 8% while private sector enrolments increased by 33%, facilitated by public capital and recurrent funding. This was the period of the public sector’s greatest of loss of enrolment share and advantaged students and greatest increase in disadvantaged students. Yet during most of this period, Australia had Labor Governments, sympathetic to public schooling.

At a state level, large enrolment fluctuations can occur with structural changes. For example, Tasmania increased the school starting age in the early 1990s. As the resulting small cohort moved through the primary then secondary grades, the public sector experienced costs and disruptions as it disproportionately lost enrolments while the private sector maintained stable enrolments in the affected grades.

At the local level the differential impact of substantial enrolment fluctuations occurs when new suburbs are established and mature. For example, new housing was established in the ACT Tuggeranong district between the late 1960s and late 1980s. By the early 2010s, the school age population bulge from Tuggeranong’s peak “nappy valley” years had left school. Between 2001 and 2011, total Tuggeranong primary school student numbers halved, public school enrolments fell by a disproportionate 71%, and private school enrolments by only 19%. The pattern was similar at the secondary level.

Qualitative enrolment issues can be even more powerful. Private schools have freedoms to select and exclude, while the public sector has a responsibility to serve all comers, including the disruptive and difficult, increasing costs not accounted for by official measures of disadvantage.

What can be done

These factors contribute to a powerful dynamic of residualisation of the public sector. Some strategies can ameliorate this, even if marginally. In addition to immediately funding public schools to at least the agreed (sector blind) standard, the federal government, rather than school authorities, should fund the costs related to the development of early career teachers. Strategies concerned with teacher shortages (specialist and general) and with enrolments (numerical and qualitative) are more difficult but should be implemented – some possibilities are discussed in my Australian Educational Researcher article. Fundamental structural changes must also occur.

Australia is heading relentlessly towards even greater segregation and inequality in schooling, poorer educational outcomes and a diminished nation. The federal government must accept its responsibility for this situation and act. Some necessary action requires little political courage, though much more is necessary to restrain this juggernaut.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.