The privatisation of public education funds

Since its election in 1996 the Howard Govt has sought to shift people across into private schools - insisting that consumers (parents and students) can exercise choice about which schools to attend. But 70% of Australian children attend a public school, and the Federal Government’s rhetoric of “choice” attempts to mask the reality that it is only the minority with the finances and cultural resources who are in a position to exercise this so-called choice. In addition for those in rural areas there is often no real choice as there are only public schools in the district.

• The OECD 2000 Edition of “Education At A Glance” places Australia’s commitment to public spending on education in the context of other OECD countries. In 1997 Australia spent 4.3% of its GDP on all public educational institutions, well below the country mean of 5.1%. Australia ranked equal 24th out of 28 countries.

• More illuminating is the table comparing public spending on both private and public educational institutions. For once Australia came near the top; it was 3rd out of 26 countries in the proportion of public money it gave to private institutions, and this is PRIOR to the Howard Government’s enormous increases to private schools.

Since 1996 the Coalition has instituted several major changes to encourage the growth of private schools at the expense of the public system. These are :-

1. The abolition of the New School Policy which had strictly regulated the establishment of new private schools, funding instead the establishment of any non-government school which meets minimum State level requirements. Any new non-government school can now be established and federally funded, without analysis of the impact on neighbouring schools, and with minimal State requirements. This has seen the mushrooming of tiny ‘independent’ schools around the country, often based on specific beliefs such as fundamentalist religious schools, who can immediately access public funds including establishment grants. Many of these schools do not even employ trained teachers.

2. The next move was the establishment of the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment scheme. Under this scheme any increase in the proportion of students in private schools requires the return of State public education funds to the Federal government to the tune of $1712 per student. Given that the Federal Government is actively encouraging private school enrolments and expects these to increase, the amount of funding lost to government schools is significant. Nationally this has meant the loss of $60 million from the funding to which public schools are entitled under the States Grant, despite an increase in enrolments of 26,000 students. Amidst considerable community and political pressure, the Coalition rescinded the EBA in 2001.

3. Finally, the Coalition abolished the Educational Resources Index (ERI) which funded private schools on the basis of their resources, replacing it with a system which allocates funds according to the so-called socio-economic status (SES) index of the school, which they do not determine by looking at the individual parents’ income but rather by looking at the postcodes of a sample of parents at the school and comparing them with the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ demographic profile for this area. Each postcode in Australia has been designated a “wealth index” and if a rich person lives in an area with a low index then their private school will benefit accordingly.

This formula assumes firstly that private school parents are representative of a community, which they are usually not, and secondly that incomes are fairly constant within postcode areas, which is a nonsense for much of Australia.
As a result the majority of the Federal Government’s $4 billion windfall to private schools has been given to the richest private schools (old Category 1-3 schools) which already have enormous resources and only service 1/3rd of all private school enrolments.

Under this new system neither the schools resources, nor their fund-raising capacity is taken into consideration. The King’s School in Parramatta has 15 cricket fields, 5 basketball courts, 12 tennis courts, 13 rugby fields, 3 soccer fields, an indoor rifle range, a cross country course, gym, 50 metre swimming pool and a boatshed - yet none of these resources are included in the Federal government’s assessment of neediness.

Within Melbourne a wealthy school like Wesley receives an additional $4 million/year (and Caulfield Grammar and Haileybury College receive $3 million/year each), while the genuinely needy local public schools receive only $4,000 each - an average of $5/student for a school with 800 students.

And despite the Federal Government’s protestations that many “battlers’ attend private schools, a study by the Australian Centre for Equity through Education demonstrates that private school attendance is directly linked to parental income levels, so the ‘battlers’ are the exception rather than the rule.

The Federal Government also insists that this money will provide greater parental “choice”, but the Category 1 private schools have not lowered fees since their windfall. What the private schools do however is behave as predators within the system – giving scholarships to the brightest students in the public system who are also usually the easiest to teach, boosting their own school VCE results and leaving a greater percentage of more difficult students in the public system.

The Catholic school system, which enrols about 20% of students, opted out of the SES Index and did their own deal with the government, neglecting their espoused principles of equity and social justice. They have been the only religion to get their own sweetheart deal, and neither side of politics is willing to risk alienating them. Other church-affiliated private schools have shown themselves equally devoid of principles as they clamour for public funding.

Prior to the large increases, private schools in 2000 already received an average of $5,307 in government contributions ($3,007 Commonwealth and $2,300 State) in addition to the private fees that they charge (which vary from $2,000 to $14,000 per student), while public schools students received an average total of $6,578/year/student ($764 Commonwealth and $5,814 State). Hence the richest private schools have up to three times as much money to spend on each child. Add to this that the parents of well-off students can now buy a place for their children at university for a considerably lower ENTER score than non fee-paying students, and we have an education system that is skewed heavily towards the rich and the privileged.

WILL YOU SUPPORT THIS RE-DEFINITION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION?

IT CAN ONLY BE ALTERED AT THE GOVERNMENT POLICY LEVEL.