Message from the Headmaster
‘You shall not covet your neighbour’s house…’
Exodus 20:17
Government Funding of Independent Schools – The Politics and the Reality
Dear Parents and Carers,
The letter pages of the daily press are relentless in expressing condemnation of Independent schools receiving Government money. The system is opaque, and easily misunderstood or distorted. Many people appear to believe that Independent schools are taking money from Government schools, that they receive more money from the Government than do Government schools, and that the money they receive is taken from the State schools sector. Those who work in Independent schools, or send their children to them, can be made to seem like robber barons and pariahs. None of these narratives are in fact correct.
The essential point in unravelling the complication and misunderstanding is that Independent schools receive most of whatever funding Governments provide from the Federal Government. Government schools receive most of the funding provided for them from State or Territory Governments. Sometimes, critics of the system confine themselves only to Federal funding, not mentioning State or Territory funding. Some who bemoan this conflict assert that at root, this is the politics of envy. Certainly, the scriptures encourage us not to covet: “You shall not covet your neighbour’s house…” (Exodus 20:17). That said, as a former Government school Principal, I must agree that Government schools need more funding. This is an issue for Government, not the Independent sector.
In a nutshell, provision of Government money to Independent schools is on a sliding scale based on perceived need, as outlined below. Schools like Shore, where the statistics indicate most parents are reasonably affluent, receive relatively little Government money. Our statistic is that 92 percent of the income necessary to run Shore is contributed by parents, nearly all of it in school fees. Of the eight percent from Government, six percent is from the Federal Government and two percent is from the State Government. Contrary to the assertions of many critics, Shore and schools like Shore receive no Government money whatsoever for capital works.
At the opposite end of the scale, Independent schools, which are characteristically in growth corridors on the perimeter of Australia’s capital cities, are low fee, receive rather more money than a School like Shore, based on assessed need, and rather less than a Government school in the same demography. Historically, Government funding, of non-Government schools, phases out at a maximum of 70 percent of funding of their operational budgets.
It is not a zero sum game. If non-Government and other Independent schools did not exist, their students would be in State schools, where, unlike in non-Government and Independent schools, each student place would be fully funded, at much greater cost to Government.
How did Education in Australia get into this mess of confusion and adversarial politics? The short form answer is Goulburn 1962. In this year, the Catholic Bishop of Goulburn responded to a demand from Government that the bathrooms in Diocesan Catholic schools be improved, by closing all his schools (arguing they did not have the money to comply) and directing all parents to enrol their children at local Government schools. The State system could not cope with this influx and so State Aid for non-Government schools (and opposition to it) was born. The Menzies Government targeted the introduction of Science laboratories, and later Libraries, to all Australian High Schools.
In the 1990s, the Howard Government embarked on a Choice of Schools Policy that saw a funding model for Independent schools, rated according to categories 1 – 12 (in practice 1 – 10), with the schools with the highest numbers attracting more funding than those with the lowest. This system was extensively criticised as it was not flexible; schools were “stuck”, for good or bad at their initial level even if their client group and demography changed.
Earlier this century, the SES (Socio-Economic Status) model was introduced. Funding for Independent schools was based on small units called Census Districts, representing around 100 homes, where the average of income, as well as the mode of employment (professional, trades, unskilled) and the level of education of the adults in these homes, all reduced to a single number, became the unit score, whether or not many or most of these households had a child enrolled at the school under consideration for its SES score. This was criticised as a blunt instrument, which was not sufficiently granular to give an accurate outcome.
In recent years, the SES system has been replaced by DMI (Direct Measure of Income), based on individual tax return data. It is therefore much more accurate in that it is individual. It still has its problems: it only measures actual income as per tax returns, not assets, hence some parents at a school may be cash flow poor at the time, but actually very wealthy given their property holdings.
Currently, 36 percent of Australian students attend non-Government schools, comprising 18 percent in Independent schools like Shore, and 18 percent in systemic schools such as Diocesan Catholic schools, Steiner schools, Montessori schools, and Lutheran schools. This proportion has been increasing gradually, year by year, for some decades. In Sydney and Melbourne, about 50 percent of Year 11 and 12 students are in non-Government schools.
The Gonski models (Gonski 1.0 and Gonski 2.0) proposed “blind” funding irrespective of sector of school. Gonski has been buffeted by various interest groups and Governments to amend its original intention. However, the main difficulty with the Gonski proposals has been lack of funding from Government to fully implement them.
The ideological opponents of Independent schools caricature them as monochrome, represented by the facilities of the wealthiest schools only, and misrepresented as “holy huddles” who only enrol students of the preferred religion or denomination of the school and in that sense do not reflect pluralistic and multicultural Australia. These assertions are not true of Shore, nor of the majority of Independent schools. In fact, the cultural profile of most Independent schools differs little from that of most Government schools in the same demography.
One imagines, sadly, that the “funding wars” will continue while ever they excite the interests of the consumers of media. This is regrettable, as schools across the sectors have more in common than ways in which they are different, and a unity of vision would be most valuable for the nation.
Regards
Dr John Collier
Headmaster