In the 1970s Australia established our present system of funding for both public and private schools. Public schools remained fully funded, open and free to everyone. Private schools, partially funded by government, were open to some, at a price.
It was the perfect script to create today’s mess. As Dean Ashenden has commented, we ended up with “schools permitted to select on grounds of capacity to pay and/or religious affiliation and/or academic performance and schools prohibited from doing any of those things; parents who are required to pay when often they can’t afford it and parents who aren’t and can; and parents who are offered the full menu and others who must take whatever is put on their plate.”
Australia was unique in the democratic world, said another education specialist back in the 1980s — “a kind of wonder at which people [in other countries] gape.” It remains unique, people still gape, and it still doesn’t work. The difference today is that half a century of accumulating problems — rusted-on inequity and inequality, achievement gaps and more — are impossible to hide.
What went wrong? Partisan politics and an ad hoc federalism are frequently blamed, and almost every reform fix thrown at the system has made little difference.
Several countries resolved similar problems in the 1970s, but in very different ways. Canada’s British Columbia funded their private schools at half the cost of running local public schools. They could charge fees for the other half but would lose their public funding if the fees raised more than that. It’s not perfect, but BC’s school system is in far better shape than ours. Subject to strict conditions, New Zealand fully funded most of its private schools. It’s not perfect either, but they are well ahead of us in the equality and equity stakes.
Australia’s schools have long suffered the vagaries of politics, rampant vested interests and changing governments. Politics rule: Labor governments try to sustain needs-based funding, the Coalition favours private schools. Both assume that any change, including to funding, could simply be grafted onto the existing public/private system with its contrasting and unequal obligations and resourcing. Hence Australia’s schools have become the socially divided system anticipated by its critics and avoided by other countries.
Schools are now divided in almost every community. School choice, for those with the resources to choose, has become a scramble for perceived advantage, creating an apartheid-like social separation between low and higher status schools. As Ross Gittins once asked: “what did the rich school student say to the poor school student?” Answer: nothing, they never met.
In the public mind at least, the schools divide is between winning and losing schools. Hence the schools that have ended up towards the top of the socioeconomic pile — the growing private school sector as well as selective or well-positioned public schools — are wedded to what we have. They are the schools that advantaged families admire and politicians don’t want to touch.
How do you change such a system? The answer may be that change becomes possible only when the system is so clearly failing that something has to give. We are now at that point. In recent years, inequity and unfairness across the system have drawn increasing attention, alongside concern about a parallel decline in overall student outcomes.
While school funding issues are still with us, the last few years have seen a greater focus on the underpinning problems. Researchers have drilled down into the impact of the school divide on the most disadvantaged. Its cost is now measured in years of lost learning, but there are multiple other impacts. Dean Ashenden has successfully joined the dots between where we are and the narrowing of achievement measures and, indeed, of the whole purpose of schooling. Researcher Barbara Preston has shown how the very unlevel school playing field, still firmly in place, has affected schools. A new grassroots organisation, Schools for all Australia, is gathering together a diverse team to push the drive for solutions.
Alongside growing doubts about incremental reform has come increasing interest in the idea of a common framework for all Australian schools. The charity Australian Learning Lecture, or ALL, supported a team of educators to see how this works overseas. Their report, Lessons from Canada: An Equal School System Is Possible, describes structural solutions that have worked especially well in Ontario.
In brief, a common framework for schools would require that public obligations — equity, openness, and so on — should apply equally to all fully publicly funded schools that sign up to the framework, including those considered private. To be part of the framework schools would be free to the user and open to children of all abilities. They would be prohibited from excluding children on any basis other than their specific religious or educational ethos. In effect, all schools within the framework would be fully publicly funded to meet recurrent and capital costs on the same needs-basis. Non-government schools that don’t accept that requirement would receive no public funds.
Knee-jerk reactions to this proposal have come from both public and private schools and their supporters. On the public side, the Australian Education Union seems to be showing a studied lack of interest; its focus is overwhelmingly on industrial matters — teachers’ salaries and conditions — and efforts to achieve full Gonski funding. But not long ago it commissioned research showing how Australian governments already give recurrent higher levels of funding to large numbers of private schools than to public schools with similar demographics — a finding that somewhat dates the main objection to the common framework: that it would boost funding to private schools. It is already happening, yet without anything near full public obligations.
Also on the public side, Trevor Cobbold from Save Our Schools, a pro–government school lobby group, has also fired a shot across the bows of a common framework. But both his objections and a response I co-wrote with Tom Greenwell illustrate how a reasonably constructive debate can be conducted, one that tackles the doubts and clarifications essential for any agreement.
Inevitably there are misunderstandings. A common framework wouldn’t see private (especially church) schools becoming part of the secular public system. It would see them operating in parallel with public schools but on a level playing field — open to all comers — not one that unfairly creates winners and losers among kids, schools and communities. Fixing the playing field requires that public funding of all schools must be accompanied by a comparable set of public obligations.
Cobbold won’t be alone in declaring that a common framework is not politically possible. In his words, “many private systems are highly unlikely to surrender the financial and structural privileges they currently enjoy.” Indeed, if the experience overseas is any guide, many won’t. In countries such as New Zealand, Britain, much of Europe and Canada the fully private sectors receive no public funding at all and variously enrol between 5 and 8 per cent of students. In the Australian context, the withdrawal of those schools from the framework would release up to a billion dollars in funds each year, which would then go to participating schools.
In fairness, Cobbold has searched for alternative solutions, the most recent including a “Gonski Plus” model that, he writes, would limit “taxpayer funding of private schools to filling any gap between private income and the community resource standard.” But that plan would require politicians to summon the courage, capacity and political will to substantially cut private school funding, in the process shifting an additional burden onto parents.
By contrast, a politician who “gets” a common framework could easily say to parents, “I am going to lower your cost-of-living by completely removing one of the biggest pressures you are facing right now — school fees.” For the first time ever, the choruses about school choice would change tune: choice would no longer be a privilege of the wealthy. The strugglers could choose a “private” school. Enrolments would be more evenly spread, with spin-offs for all schools and overall levels of student achievement. No longer would public schools have to accept the lion’s share of responsibility for the most disadvantaged and highest-cost students. The ultimate bonus is that the never-ending conflict over religion, elitism and choice could finally be consigned to history.
How might the private school sectors eventually respond? Their difficulty is that the various arguments they have mounted haven’t changed much over decades. Yes, there are more “low fee” Catholic and independent schools these days — but even the lowest-fee school in a middle or struggling community discriminates in enrolments in a way that mocks school choice. It’s not a good look, and proposals for a common framework leave it exposed.
The challenge to the private sector is how to examine its assumptions and reshape its advocacy. Without this, its dated claims will be seen as bending the truth in an inadequate justification of the status quo. In the following example, claims made just six years ago by the Centre for Independent Studies (headlined “The Truth”) no longer stand up against a very easy qualification or rebuttal (in italics below):
• Private schools do not drain money from public schools.
At the moment they do. Governments can’t fund — in whole or in part — two unequal systems.
• Private schools have spent less per student than public schools.
They do indeed, but only public schools must be available to every student from every family, in every circumstance and location. That costs!
• Private schools are not “elitist.”
But in almost every case and place, their enrolment comes from higher SES families.
• Private schools achieve better results than public schools.
No they don’t. Schools with similar demographics, regardless of sector, have similar results.
• Private school students have better post-school outcomes.
Which outcomes? It’s a bold claim, variously challenged over the last decade.
• Parents choose private schools for many reasons, not just academic performance.
In this context, so what?
In fairness, such claims usually derive from private school peak groups and cheer squads rather than the schools themselves. Inevitably they rely on misleading averages of inputs and outputs (for example, funding and test scores) of often dissimilar groups of schools. The challenge to all sectors in any debate is to put such nonsense aside and engage with what the real world of schools has become.
By any measure the status quo is not an option. It is inherently corrosive to the (mainly public) schools drawing their students from lower socioeconomic families, while schools towards the top of the heap will remain better resourced because they can charge fees as well as receiving generous public subsidies. They would continue to exclude, whether intentionally or otherwise, children who are more expensive to educate. This reality exposes mainly public schools to an inexorable dynamic of segregation and residualisation. The trend has reached alarming proportions in the last eight years.
The federal government especially seems open to creative solutions to rusted-on problems. As Sean Kelly recently wrote, when the government began talking about a broken status quo it focused on housing and tax, which was recently broadened by the prime minister to encompass the entire economy and then followed by treasurer Jim Chalmers, who said “the status quo is not working for people” in both the economy and society.
Schools must be front and centre of better policy and planning. They are not only part of the economy and society, in no small measure they create both. •
