Treating public schools as competitors in an education marketplace shifts blame downward, obscures chronic underfunding and corrodes the very purpose of public education.

There was a moment, not so long ago, when the New South Wales Department of Education began urging public schools to increase their “market share.” The phrase appeared quietly at first in strategic documents, leadership briefings, enrolment discussions. Then it became explicit. Schools were encouraged to defend their position in an increasingly competitive education marketplace. Declining enrolments were framed not as a system failure, but as a challenge for schools to address.

It was a small linguistic shift, but a profound one. In that moment, public education was no longer being described as a public good. It was being recast as a competitor.

The language matters because it reveals how the bureaucracy now understands the problem and where it believes responsibility lies. If enrolments fall, it is not because of inequitable funding, selective schooling, or the residualisation of public schools as providers of last resort. It is because schools have failed to compete effectively.

This is not policy. It is ideology.

To understand the absurdity of the ‘market share’ directive, imagine two car yards side by side. One yard is funded to deliver vehicles that meet only 90 per cent of the minimum roadworthiness standard. The other is funded well above the standard, better materials, better safety features, better presentation. Then the regulator steps in and asks the first yard why customers are choosing the second.

That, in effect, is what the NSW Government has done with schooling.

Public schools are funded below the agreed Schooling Resource Standard, the minimum required to meet student need while many private schools are funded above it. This is not contested. It is acknowledged in official reports. And yet, rather than correcting this imbalance, the Department tells public schools to improve their “market position.”

The logic is breathtaking.

Market competition assumes comparable starting conditions. Public education does not have them. Public schools must accept every child, regardless of disability, trauma, behavioural complexity or disadvantage. They cannot select their intake. They cannot refuse enrolments. They cannot shape their ‘customer base.’ And yet they are told to compete against schools that can do all of these things and do them very effectively.

The rhetoric of market share does something else, too. It quietly shifts responsibility. Declining enrolments are no longer the consequence of policy decisions made in Macquarie Street. They are the responsibility of principals and teachers. If families leave, schools must have failed to promote themselves adequately. If communities lose confidence, schools must have failed to differentiate their ‘product.’

In this framing, underfunding disappears. Structural inequality disappears. What remains is a branding problem.

This is not an accident. It is a hallmark of modern managerialism. When systems fail, responsibility is displaced downward. Central office retains authority, schools inherit blame.

What makes this particularly cruel is the context in which public schools now operate. Many are carrying the cumulative weight of social policy failure: housing insecurity, mental health crises, intergenerational poverty, family violence, and the long tail of trauma. These are not marginal factors. They define the daily reality of teaching in large parts of the system.

To then ask these schools to compete in an education marketplace is not merely unrealistic, it is a moral inversion. Public schools are penalised for doing the work the system relies on them to do.

The Department’s market share rhetoric also ignores the demographic realities driving enrolment shifts. Population movement, housing affordability, the expansion of selective schooling, and the aggressive growth strategies of the private sector all play a role. These are structural forces, not school-level decisions. No amount of marketing can counteract them.

And yet the response is to tell schools to adapt, innovate, rebrand.

There is another layer to this story, one that deepens the contradiction. While schools are urged to compete, the central bureaucracy has continued to expand. Policy units, executive roles, oversight divisions and compliance structures have grown steadily. The system has increased its capacity to generate strategy while reducing its capacity to deliver education.

This imbalance is revealing. The Department has the resources to produce rhetoric about markets, but not the will to address the conditions that make competition inherently unfair. It is easier to speak of ‘choice’ than to fund equity. Easier to talk about brand than to confront residualisation.

The result is a system in which public schools are asked to solve problems they did not create, using tools they have not been given.

The market share directive also erodes something more subtle but more important: the moral foundation of public education. Public schools exist to serve communities, not markets. They are places of inclusion, not competition. When they are told to think like businesses, they are being asked to abandon their defining purpose.

This shift has consequences. It fosters shame. Schools begin to internalise failure. Staff are told they must be more appealing, more competitive, more strategic even as they are managing crises that have nothing to do with educational quality. The language of markets becomes a quiet form of institutional humiliation.

This is not how strong public systems behave. They do not ask their most burdened institutions to compete harder. They invest. They stabilise. They accept responsibility.

The truth is that public schools are not losing market share because they are inferior. They are losing market share because governments have allowed a two-tier system to flourish while pretending it does not exist. To then ask public schools to fix the consequences of that decision is a failure of honesty.

The market share narrative is not a solution. It is a deflection.

If the Department wishes to arrest enrolment decline, it must abandon the illusion of competition and return to the principles that once defined public education: equity, adequacy, and collective responsibility. Until then, the call to increase market share will remain what it already is, a symptom of a bureaucracy that cannot see the system it governs.

Public education does not need better marketing. It needs honesty. And it needs courage.