Who is starving public education?

By Jane Caro,

Convenor of Priority Public

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Schools Report 2003, an estimated 6000 NSW school students swapped from public to private last year.

When faced with this statistic, both levels of Government, State and Federal, wash their hands of responsibility by blaming one another.

The Federal Government claims public schools are the responsibility of the NSW Government, and blames them, even though it also funds public schools.

The State Government points out they spend 85% of their schools budget on the kids who attend NSW public schools, while the Federal Government allocates the vast majority of its funding to private schools, and so it blames the Howard Government.

But, is either response really good enough?

After all, Brendan Nelson is not yet called the Federal Minister for Private Education. Though perhaps he ought to be if he doesn't start paying some serious attention to the very real possibility that we may become the first Western democracy to decide it is acceptable to reduce its public schools to a residual, safety net system.

Particularly as those same schools are left to cope with all the most difficult to teach kids; those from low socio-economic backgrounds, the majority of disabled kids, kids with English as a second language, behaviour disordered kids and, of course, all of those the private schools do not want.

Already, Australia has one of the biggest gaps between the best and the worst academic performers in the OECD. And it isn't all about boys, either. It's also about privilege.

Does anyone seriously believe that we can accept a gap like this, let our public schools decline in this way, and still call ourselves a democracy?

Surely a functioning democracy is a society which at least attempts to give all its kids; rich or poor, black or white, loved or unloved, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or Hindu, a more or less equal chance for a decent education?

The State Government, apart from making a few of the right noises, is really doing very little. Even the increase in the desperately needed teachers development allowance doesn't bear close examination. Despite raising it from a scandalous $24 a year to $600, a number of compulsory courses, such as first aid, which used to be free, now must be paid for out of this money. This is a direct result of shedding the DET consultants who ran these courses, which now must be outsourced.

Worse, locked into the NSW Education Act is the fact that for every $1 the State Government spends on a student at a public school, it must spend 25 cents on a student at a private school.

The same problem exists at a Federal level, where per capita funding is also allocated as a percentage of the cost of educating a child in public schools.

To even begin to close the ever-widening gap between not just public and private schools, but our most and least privileged kids, the NSW Government must repeal Section 21 of the NSW Education Act, and the Federal Government must scrap the States Grants Act. If we do not, the current gap will endlessly continue, as will the movement of kids (whose parents can afford it) to private schools.

The recent largesse of the Federal Government to Catholic schools illustrates the basic unfairness of our funding mechanisms exquisitely. If they had given the extra $364 million to public schools, the current funding formulas dictate that private schools must receive extra money as well. However, when more public money is given to private schools, Catholic or not, public schools get nothing. Not a sausage, not a biscuit, not a crayon.

Just as a free press is fundamental to democracy, so is a strong public education system.

To paraphrase J. Ralston Saul, you can judge a society, not by how it treats its most privileged citizens, but how it treats its least.

Especially when we are talking about children.