Fees charged by elite private schools go on rising. But who is paying the price?

On 23 January, The Australian Financial Review reported that “the most expensive private schools are on are on a track to double their fees in a decade to $100,000 a year”. The AFR asked “where will it end, and will parents be deterred?”

The answer is almost certainly that many won’t be. In fact, the more these schools charge, the more some parents want to buy their child a place.

Barbara Preston has documented how our country has forged its way to achieving high and increasing levels of segregation and inequality in our school system accompanied by poorer educational outcomes, and becoming what she described as ‘a diminished nation’. Given growing threats to democracy across the world, a school system degraded by class and wealth divisions is something to avoid.

Of all the forces contributing to growing inequality in our school system, the most significant is the inequitable distribution of teachers among schools. 

The sector that contributes most to this problem – the independent private school sector – is now the fastest growing. And it is the highest-fee schools that contribute most.

Within this sector, schools operate on a more individualistic and less collective basis than systemic schools, public and Catholic. There is more scope in both systems for efficiencies in the sharing out of teachers; and when it comes to teacher salaries, Catholic system authorities operate largely in parallel with public schools and do not set higher rates.

As Chris Bonnor pointed out in the Sydney Morning Herald, if Australia’s teachers were more equitably distributed, the teacher supply problem would be significantly eased; and that while public and some Catholic schools were being starved of teachers, wealthier independent schools had a surplus.

A recent correspondent to the SMH asked “what’s wrong with parents sending their kid to a high-fee private school they perceive to be a good choice for whatever reason, if they can afford to?”

What is wrong is that when they make that personal decision for whatever reason their choice affects the distribution of teachers across the system and the education of other people’s children.

The teaching force is a national asset. Moreover, it is arguably a publicly funded one. The Commonwealth Budget for non-government schools is now around $20 billion annually. This means in practice that most schools in the private sector receive more government funding than is needed to cover their teaching costs.

In the context of a worldwide shortage of teachers, Australia now has amongst the most severe shortage in the OECD**.** 

The independent school lobby seems desperate to distract public attention away from these untypically wealthy schools by pointing to the growth of ‘lower-fee’ schools. Claims are made, for example, that fewer than 6 per cent of NSW independent schools charge fees over $30,000; but neglecting to mention that many of these are very large schools.

The greed of the wealthiest schools is not the only contributor to teacher shortage and the maldistribution of the teaching force across the country; but other factors are more complex and less open to policy change.

Wealthy, exclusive schools have friends in high places and have achieved a peculiar status in Australia: it is as if they are in our national school system, yet not of it.

The Whitlam Government came to office with a 1972 election promise to redress disparities in educational opportunities. In 1973 it yielded to sectarian pressure from the Country Party for recurrent grants to include the then roughly 5 per cent of the highest-fee schools, largely non-Catholic. This was the price paid for the passage of legislation to meet urgent needs in the majority of schools, public and Catholic. The Whitlam Government could have imposed conditions on this funding but did not do so. And these schools continue to keep their public funding free from commensurate obligations to protect the public interest and the integrity of the nation’s school system.

The advent of the neo-liberal era with its consumer choice and provider competition – and the Howard Government in particular – weakened the school system’s capacity to hold on to democratic principles such as quality, equality and equity, efficiency and effectiveness, transparency, and accountability.

Market-based policies mean that consumers and providers that are strong in the market flourish at the expense of those who are weak. And the asymmetrical roles of the commonwealth and states in the funding and regulation of schooling create complexities which serve to hide the damage to ‘other people’s children’.

Teachers are not being distributed properly among all our schools and all our children and young people. This is clear, whether seen from the perspective of human rights, educational outcomes, productivity and the economic use of resources, or social cohesion.

The hefty share of responsibility for this untenable situation lies with the commonwealth and it is well-placed to increase transparency and equity.  As well as providing 80 per cent of the recurrent funding entitlement of the non-government sector, the commonwealth regulates the industrial relations of its employees across the across the country.

For the Albanese government, it is time for action to reduce, as far as possible, the ability for private schools to use their superior resources to attract teachers at the expense of schools where they are needed far more. This is not a matter of where these resources come from – whether these schools are using private or public funding or a mix of both – it is a matter of how they spend it. And it requires stricter registration requirements for private schools.

Although responsibility for their registration lies with states and territories, the commonwealth is well-placed to play a leadership role in achieving a fairer distribution of the teaching force across all schools.

It should work in partnership with states and territories to include in their registration requirements that all private school providers set classroom teacher salaries in line with the award salaries for teachers in public schools in their state/territory; and should make its funding to this sector contingent upon achieving agreement.

The most readily available lever available to governments to influence the quality of schooling is to invest in teaching.

Given its responsibility for higher education, the commonwealth should consider how to better focus its current investment in schooling on strengthening its own role in the recruitment, supply and quality of initial and ongoing teacher education and training.