Education savings schemes appear sensible and responsible. But their quiet rise reflects a deeper failure – a loss of confidence in Australia’s commitment to properly fund public education as a shared civic good.

The email arrived quietly, as most do. A brochure promoting an education savings plan – sensible, well designed, and carefully worded. It made no grand claims, issued no manifesto, and offered no criticism of public schools. It simply invited parents to plan ahead, to be prudent, and to take responsibility for their children’s educational futures.

There was nothing alarming about it. In fact, that was precisely why it lingered.

After a lifetime working in public education, I still hold to its founding promise: that education is a shared civic commitment, not a private purchase. So when an education savings product lands in one’s inbox, it prompts a question worth asking gently rather than defensively: what does it say about the system we now inhabit when education is increasingly framed as something families must financially prepare for, rather than something society guarantees?

This is not an argument against saving, nor a criticism of families who do. It is an attempt to notice a shift – cultural rather than legislative – that has gathered momentum alongside years of unresolved school funding failure.

For much of the twentieth century, public education rested on an implicit social contract. Governments would provide a baseline of quality schooling, and families would trust that contract. Education was never equal in outcome, but it was equal in intent.

Education savings schemes quietly introduce a different logic. They suggest that educational outcomes are no longer something the public system can reliably guarantee, and that families would therefore be wise to hedge their bets. Responsibility subtly migrates from the state to the household. If outcomes disappoint, the failure is no longer systemic; it becomes personal. You did not plan early enough. You did not invest wisely enough.

This shift matters because it changes how inequality is understood. Structural under-resourcing becomes invisible, replaced by narratives of foresight and choice. What appears as prudent individual behaviour slowly erodes the idea of education as a shared public good.

This cultural shift cannot be separated from Australia’s long-running and unresolved school funding failure. The review led by David Gonski made a clear, evidence-based case: equitable, needs-based funding was essential if schools were to meet increasingly complex student need. The Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) was intended to define the minimum required for an adequate education, not an aspiration, but a floor.

More than a decade on, most public schools remain funded below that standard, while many private schools sit comfortably above it. This is not a technical accounting issue. It has practical consequences: larger classes, fewer specialists, reduced capacity to support students with disability, trauma, or complex behavioural needs, and mounting strain on teachers and school leaders.

In this context, education savings schemes do not emerge in a vacuum. They are a rational response to declining confidence in the public guarantee itself.

Once education is framed as an investment, it inevitably attracts commercial interest. Global education corporations have expanded rapidly across curriculum, assessment, data systems, and professional learning. Firms such as Pearson now operate at a scale where national education systems represent both markets and long-term revenue streams.

This commercialisation is often defended as pragmatic modernisation. Yet it also brings a subtle form of policy inertia. Assessment regimes such as NAPLAN persist not only because of educational arguments, but because entire contractual ecosystems depend upon them. Once embedded, such programs become difficult to dislodge even when their educational value is contested or when reform is clearly warranted.

When education becomes a commodity, continuity begins to matter more than improvement. Contracts begin to matter more than consequences. And the space for genuinely needs-based reform steadily narrows.

Residualisation is often discussed politely, as though it refers simply to the concentration of socio-economic disadvantage. The reality inside public schools is more confronting.

Public education is now absorbing not only poverty, but a growing concentration of students with severe trauma histories, extreme behavioural dysregulation, and, increasingly, violence. These students are not evenly distributed across the system. They are overwhelmingly educated in public schools, not because public schools are failing, but because private schools largely do not enrol them, despite frequent denials to the contrary.

Recent research capturing the testimonies of Australian public-school principals makes this reality difficult to ignore. Violence against staff is no longer exceptional; it is routine. Principals describe being assaulted, threatened, stalked, and traumatised. One spoke of recurring dreams of being shot. Another described such incidents as “just another normal day”.

This is not a failure of individual schools or leaders. It is the predictable outcome of a system that concentrates complexity while withholding the resources required to manage it.

What makes this trajectory so troubling is not that these patterns are unknown. They are well documented, widely acknowledged within the profession, and repeatedly raised by educators, unions, and researchers. What remains unresolved is political will.

Successive governments, including those who claim a working-class heritage, continue to refuse to fund public schools to the identified minimum standard, while simultaneously increasing public subsidies to already over-funded private schools. This is not fiscal prudence; it is a moral choice.

In that light, education savings schemes are not the cause of public education’s decline. They are another small signal of it, a quiet adaptation to a system that no longer keeps its promises.

The brochure that arrived in my inbox did not argue against public education. It did not need to. It simply assumed a world in which families must individually manage educational risk.

That assumption should give us pause.

Australia still has a choice. We can recommit to the unfinished promise of needs-based funding. We can treat the SRS as a floor rather than a rhetorical device. And we can resist the slow cultural slide toward a system in which opportunity is privately financed and publicly excused.

Education savings schemes may be prudent financial tools. But they are also signals. And what they signal is not parental irresponsibility, but a growing doubt, not about children’s futures, but about our collective willingness to guarantee them.