The battle for public education

“The Gonski review was an attempt to make our system fairer, and its recommendations might have had a positive effect, if politics and vested interests had not got involved. Those who care about public education, both as a principle and as an indispensable part of our democracy, must be prepared for the powerful and the privileged to do all they can to head off any changes. Jane Caro. Image: Supplied. Therefore, as I consider potential solutions, I will examine how politically possible they may be, as well as how effective. The first suggestion about making our schooling systems more equal is, I believe, also the most politically achievable. It is something that has been suggested by many people, including participants in a national symposium on funding, equity and achievement in Australian schools, all of whom believe that all schools in receipt of public money be subject to the same obligations. In other words, all publicly funded schools should have to abide by the same standards of compliance, implementation and accountability for enrolment, behaviour and inclusion. This seems reasonable and logical, especially as many private schools now receive as much, if not more, public funding per student than the similar public school down the road. In practice this would mean that private schools, once they had enrolled a student, would not be able to exclude that student for any reason that differs from the standard required from a public school to do the same. Perhaps even exclusion because of the nonpayment of fees should be subject to negotiation and arbitration by a body such as the Department of Education. This would stop the children private schools decide they don’t want from being dumped on the already underfunded nearby public school, thereby compounding their degree of difficulty. It would also require publicly funded private schools shoulder at least some of the responsibility for compulsory education. As such, it is an eminently arguable proposition. Why should some schools in receipt of public funding have obligations to the public good, while other schools have none? The current education funding reforms, meant to bring every school up to its SRS (School Resource Standard), will not kick in fully until 2034. Worse, they may still not be fully funded even then, given the definition of “fully funded” is disputed. And public schools will have to jump through various performance and attendance hoops to get their money. As I mentioned, all private schools must do in return for their public funding is obey the law and teach the curriculum. They don’t even have to follow the full requirements of anti-discrimination legislation. The double standard is stark. Education researchers Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor in their book, Waiting for Gonski , take this idea a step further. They suggest that all schools should be offered the chance of being totally publicly funded as long as they agree not to charge fees. They could keep their “special” character, usually religious, but would have to accept all children who wanted to attend within their area. As they would if the symposium’s reforms were implemented, some private schools, especially high-fee ones, might decide this was a bridge too far and decline the offer. In which case they would lose their public funding and be self-supporting. This would then release some badly needed dollars for schools struggling with high concentrations of disadvantage. Greenwell and Bonnor call this “The Ontario Solution” as that’s what schools in the Canadian province have done. Chris Bonnor told me about the shock the Catholic bishops of Ontario expressed when it was suggested that their schools could charge fees. They saw it as utterly antithetical to their religious mission. Maybe they should come and have a chat with the Catholic bishops in this country. In both the United Kingdom and New Zealand, the majority of religious schools are part of the public system. They do not charge fees, must accept all local kids who want to come, but may keep their religious character. The only problem with this suggestion is that the private schools will fight it to the death and that matters because they are exceptionally powerful lobbyists. They can have their cake and eat it now. Mind you, they will probably fight to the death against any attempt to rebalance the scales. The symposium I mentioned was run in 2023 by the education faculty at the University of Melbourne. It was tasked with making suggestions about what could be done to stop Australia slipping deeper into the low equity, low achievement OECD quadrant. I was one of the presenters. Below are some further suggestions that were made. Acknowledge the unique role public schools bear in shouldering the responsibility for compulsory education Take the weight public schools carry into account in funding and regulatory decisions. For example, I have heard parents complain bitterly that they do not know what class their child will be in at a public school in advance, and sometimes not for days after the school year has started. This is due to public schools never being sure how many children will turn up expecting to be enrolled. Private schools do not have this issue. Yet the uncertainty is caused by our weird hybrid system. Public schools in other countries are better able to calculate future enrolments based on demographics than Australia, which adds to cost, confusion and the duplication of administration. The symposium recommended that schools that experience greater fluctuations in enrolments – up or down – than the total change in an area should receive additional funding, and those that experience more stable enrolments should receive less funding. Schools that accept kids who have been excluded from other schools should receive extra funding, while the excluding schools should lose the same amount. The symposium was also concerned about the disproportionate number of early career teachers in public schools, especially disadvantaged schools. It recommended that those schools receive additional funding for professional development and support to help make sure that our most vulnerable kids don’t miss out on high quality teachers. It strikes me that such an investment might also help stem the departure of teachers, highest in the first five years, who resign due to feeling overwhelmed and burnt out. Nothing destroys a teacher’s morale faster than knowing what would help a struggling child while being denied the resources they need to be able to offer it. Further to this, although also not suggested at the symposium, is another question. Should overfunded private schools (and that’s almost all of them according to SRS) be able to poach teachers from underfunded (that’s also almost all of them) disadvantaged public schools, especially hard to staff schools, with offers of higher salaries and other perks? Should the government be funding schools to remove teachers from those classrooms where they are most desperately needed? Private schools do not have to reveal what they pay their principals, despite their public funding, but the recent leaking of a salary benchmarking report indicated that in 2021 they were receiving between $460,000 and $1,034,000 a year. As Julie Hare’s 2025 article pointed out, salaries are likely to have increased since then. The same article puts public school principals’ salaries – with a vastly tougher job to do – at between $200,000 and $250,000. This is an extract from Jane Caro ’ s Rich Kid, Poor Kid: The Battle for Public Education , published by the Australia Institute Press as part of its Vantage Point longform essay series.

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