Australia’s frighteningly unequal funding system favours private schools, argues Jane Caro. How can we fix it?

Australia’s schooling system is among the most highly segregated in the OECD. Public schools educate the majority of disadvantaged students, while there is concentrated advantage in private schools.

This situation can be attributed, in large part, to our school funding arrangements. Recent research from the Australian Education Union shows “over half of Australia’s private schools now receive more combined government funding per student from both the federal and state governments, than similar public schools”.

Review: Rich Kid, Poor Kid: The Battle for Public Education – Jane Caro (Australia Institute Press)

In her essay Rich Kid, Poor Kid, public education advocate Jane Caro provides a detailed historical excavation of Australia’s school funding policies, politics and policy ideologies over the past 65 years.

As its subtitle makes clear, her essay details the “battle” experienced by Australian public schools as they are often forced to compete with well-resourced private schools for enrolments. These private schools are free to charge uncapped school fees and receive government money.

At the same time, in states and territories other than the ACT, most public schools do not receive the minimum amount of their legislated government funding, known as the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS).

Caro contrasts this with the experiences of non-government or private schools (Catholic and independent schools), most of whom receive the full amount of their legislated government funding and more.

As the recently legislated Better and Fairer Schools Agreement – which seeks to address part of the funding inequality between sectors – comes into effect, Caro’s reflections and lamentations are timely.

A funding system unequal by design

Caro begins by opening the “black box” of Australia’s school funding arrangements to reveal their contents.

In order to explain the current inequalities in resource distribution, Caro takes readers on a funding policy journey. Public funding for private schooling began in the late 1960s. Until this point, the federal government played virtually no role in school funding. Initially, it began its involvement through one-off grants for government and non-government schools, to support the building of science laboratories and school libraries.

This funding expanded over time with successive federal governments, in response to a few intersecting factors.

Among these was the Catholic sector’s desperate call for financial aid from the federal government to assist with rapidly increasing enrolments, and simultaneously decreasing supply of labour and resources from its religious teachers and leaders (nuns and brothers). This call for “state aid” was politically contentious.

By 1975 – under a Whitlam Labor government – recurrent federal funding for private schools was in full swing. As Caro explains, Whitlam positioned this decision as “educationally necessary”: that is, funding based on need for both public and private schools.

But this move also served dual political purposes – it helped address the “state-aid” issue and appealed to Catholic parent voters.

Caro documents what she describes as the schooling system’s “shift from an emphasis on the public good towards the private and positional”. Subsidies for private schools continued, and even expanded, but were no longer justified by needs. Rather, a right to choice came to predominate.

This was reinforced by the next federal government under Malcolm Fraser, who embedded a “basic grant model” for private schools based on entitlement and choice, rather than need. Ultimately, these decisions provided the basis for our current system: government funding for both public and private schools – a funding system that is internationally unique.