Early in 1973 the Karmel committee, created by the new and aggressively reformist Whitlam government, was hard at work devising a way for all schools, including Catholic parish schools and a handful of upmarket private schools, to get public funding. Government schools had towered over the whole system for eighty years or more, and no wonder: they were fully funded while the Catholics and the privates had been cut off without a public penny by the “free, compulsory and secular” movement of the late nineteenth century. Riding to Whitlam’s instructions, Karmel was about to turn the tables: the non-government schools could look forward to public bounty.
The committee did as it was required to do, but was less than happy about it, and said so in carefully modulated tones: “There is a point beyond which it is not possible to consider policies relating to the private sector,” it warned, “without taking into account their possible effects on the public sector whose strength and representativeness should not be diluted.”
The problem anticipated soon materialised and grew. It has been a recurring theme in schools talk ever since, without anyone actually doing anything about it.
A few moments from an instructive story:
1978: In one of its formidable reports the Schools Commission — the Karmel committee’s successor — worried about how public policy might cause government schools to become “residual.” “Many of those who favour choice as a prime policy objective assume that the choice being spoken of is only that traditionally available between government and non-government schools,” it said. “If this is so, and as public funds now sustain this choice, important questions arise about conditions of entry to non-government schools, about the cost to parents of exercising such choice, about the extent to which the governance and operation of the schools should be publicly regulated as public subsidies rise, and about how and under what conditions new non-government schools should be permitted or assisted. There are also questions about the effect on government systems arising from making the choice to move out of them easier for parents. If such choice is greatly enhanced, government schools could become residual institutions, serving only those children whose parents were unwilling or unable to meet even low fee levels in non-government schools, or who were geographically isolated from, or indifferent to, or unaware of, alternatives.”
1984: The Australian Education Union picked up the “residualisation” idea and argued that the Schools Commission — now under new management — was making recommendations to government that would turn government schools into schools of last resort.
1998: Government secondary school enrolments fell to 64 per cent, down from 78 per cent in 1975. Catholic schools: up from 15 per cent to 22; the independents doubled their share from 7 per cent to 14. The shift was so marked and so persistent that it now had a name: the “drift.”
2001: The Ministerial Council for Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs set up a school resourcing taskforce to develop “a clear and common understanding of the premises upon which funding for schools should be based.” Subsequent work commissioned by the Victorian government argued for muscling up: non-government schools in receipt of substantial public funding should be required take all comers from the local area, with extra funding as appropriate.
2004: A Labor-dominated Senate inquiry on school funding accused the Howard government of ignoring the ministerial council’s recommendations so it could continue to push funds toward non-government schools. Coalition senators, on the other hand, saw a government that supported parents’ right to choose and committed to “raising the national standard of school education” through rigorous standards and tested attainments.
2010: Federal education minister (and deputy PM) Julia Gillard announced the “first review of schools funding in forty years” — a nod to Karmel, but with no mention of Karmel’s warnings about the “strength and representativeness” of the government sector. The review would look at funding and funding only. It was in fact a review of only some aspects of funding. It took as given the existence of three sectors — government, Catholic ad independent — and funding by two levels of government.
2012: The Gonski report was released to acclaim on all sides, except the federal opposition and, inexplicably, (now-PM) Gillard, who adopted a we’ll-have-to-see-about-the-money position. A union-led grassroots campaign for Gonski’s “needs-based funding” forced opposition leader Tony Abbott to declare a “unity ticket on Gonski.” The ticket was torn up within weeks of the Coalition taking office. A decade of Coalition government in Canberra would see most funding for the non-government sectors coming from the deep pockets of the Commonwealth, leaving the government schools to depend mainly on the chronically indigent states/territories.
2015: A small Melbourne-based group (of which I was a member) attempted a rethink of the problem. Our conclusions: “funding” meant all aspects of funding, including sources and limits; the regulation of choice and selection were as important as the funding; the problem wasn’t just “policy” for the sectors, as Karmel had suggested, but the whole sector set-up — structural reform was called for. To “level the playing field” the sectors should be moved toward common funding and regulatory regimes. Contra the implications of the “residualisation” analysis, fixing the government sector meant fixing the whole system. Papers were written, workshops held, a “high-level round table” convened, and small grants from a (nervous) foundation obtained, but in a Coalition-dominated firmament the idea got no traction.
2022: Two members of the “level playing field project,” Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor, pressed on. Their labours produced Waiting for Gonski, to excellent timing. The book’s publication coincided with the end of the Coalition decade and the arrival in Canberra of a sympathetic Labor government. In Greenwell and Bonnor’s (definitive) account of the sorry history of the sector system, Labor governments played an equivocal role while Coalition governments going back to the Howard years were ruthless in exploiting the weaknesses of the Whitlam/Karmel settlement. The upshot wasn’t just the “residualisation” of government schools: it was a wholesale demographic shift. The disadvantaged were going to school with other disadvantaged kids, the advantaged to schools for the advantaged. Greenwell and Bonnor sketched a proposal for a level playing field that would reconcile “choice” and “equity” and suggested how it might be got. Their proposals were subsequently fleshed out and popularised in a Choice and Fairness: A Common Framework for All Australian Schools. Notice was taken; they succeeded in getting “segregation” onto the new government’s agenda.
Without diminishing these achievements we must also note omissions: on the causes side of the equation, a real estate market that allowed the “advantaged” (but not others) to buy into the zone of a “good” government school; on consequences, Greenwell and Bonnor worried mainly about segregation’s impact on outcomes. Much more important is the impact on how young people, disadvantaged and advantaged, view themselves and others and see the proper working of the world, as well as its impact on the culture and the social order as a whole. Economics writer Ross Gittins summed it up: Jewish kids go to one school, Muslim kids go to another. Then he posed a riddle: what did the rich kid say to the poor kid? Answer: nothing, they never met.
2023: Federal education minister Jason Clare pointed to exceptionally high levels of social segregation in Australian schools — but then defined it as a problem only for the disadvantaged, and for them only to the extent that it affected “outcomes.” His “expert panel,” appointed to advise on the contents of the next National School Reform Agreement, reviewed the segregation question and recommended annual tracking and reporting of “socio-economic diversity” before cutting the problem down to size in three swift strokes. First, it commissioned a consulting firm to report on policy responses used in other countries; there would be no analysis of Australia’s unique sector system or policy in respect of it. Second, and following the minister, it construed segregation not as a problem for all students or for the wider society but as a problem for “the disadvantaged.” And third, the one and only problem among disadvantaged students was unsatisfactory attainment in “the basics.” Thus advised, the school reform agreements make no mention of the problem of “segregation,” by that or any other name.
2025: The Ramsay Foundation supported work by Dr Michele Bruniges, a former head of the NSW and then the federal departments of education, on “concentrations of disadvantage.” It then commissioned Essential Research to develop a guide to “framing and communicating” that problem to the wider public. Essential’s report has not been released, but it is believed to have stayed well within the “concentrations of disadvantage” construction of the problem.
What should we make of this dismal tale? One common way of looking at it is that the system is “resistant to reform.” But perhaps it’s incompetent reform that’s the problem? The sector system, and the machinery that has failed to reform it, comprise two of the three structures that shape and drive Australian schooling (the third is the organisation of students’ work). Labor governments since Rudd and Gillard (2007–13) have recognised the need for school reform but avoided structural reform and the politics it requires, preferring instead reform-as-technique, incremental steps toward targets in this or that aspect of schooling in search of a frictionless way around vested interests. Big problems have been converted into the counterfeit currency of “outcomes.” It hasn’t worked, even in its own desiccated terms, and there is no reason to believe that it will. Unlike the Schools Commission in 1978, those who now direct “reform” can measure the waves but don’t understand that beneath the waves are currents. And, also unlike the Schools Commission in 1978, “understanding” is not what they’re after. •
