For those new to the topic, it may seem both surprising and unlikely that Australian school funding has been a controversial topic of debate since the 19th century. For over a century, we’ve had twin education systems operating in parallel: a growing government education sector alongside a robust Catholic education sector.
A recap on the history: in the 1800s, Catholic schools were set up with some government funding, usually for communities where schools didn’t exist. They filled a much-needed gap in the education landscape. Many of these church schools were started by lay people, run by lay people and primarily funded by fees or donations.
In 1872, what state aid that had been available for church schools was withdrawn when Victoria under James Francis passed legislation to introduce free, compulsory, secular education. The act marked a wider shift towards accessible education for all children, regardless of their socio-economic background. Following Victoria’s lead, other Australian colonies followed suit, gradually adopting similar reforms, promoting free state education across the country and laying the foundation for the modern public education system in Australia.
The introduction of free state education initially posed significant challenges to the various Catholic schools in the country, with the new financial strain and competition. Because they received little to no government funding between 1880 and 1967, Catholic schools in Australia struggled financially, relying heavily on church support and community contributions. Many of these schools were staffed by lay people who were laid off in favour of unpaid workers from religious orders because schools could no longer afford to pay teachers.
But in 1967, the then-Premier of Victoria Henry Bolte helped change this situation. Following pressure from the Democratic Labor Party, Bolte introduced recurrent funding of non-government schools at the rate of $10 per primary student and $20 per secondary student — that was per year. The shift was significant because it marked the first time that state funds were allocated to non-government schools in any meaningful ongoing way. And this move set a precedent for government support of non-government schools across Australia. Other states began to follow suit, eventually leading to broader government funding for Catholic and other non-government schools.
The central issue has always been how to manage a system in which a large proportion of students are educated in non-government institutions with parents who pay taxes and demand the same support for their children that the students in government schools enjoy. Now in Australia today, we have 1756 Catholic schools educating over 800,000 students, or one out of every five. These schools are staffed by over 100,000 people. And, despite decades of fiddling about, a workable solution to the funding question has still not been found.
'Instead of an education system increasingly divided by class, the Catholic education sector could offer the government a new paradigm for Australian education: a new conception of public education with every school free to maintain its own character.'
It seems like the public education lobby seems forever stuck behind the Maginot Line, ready to fight the war it lost in 1967 when Henry Bolte recommenced the funding of non-government schools.
Meanwhile, almost every country in the OECD funds non-government schools, but none uses a funding model like our School Resource Standard (SRS) funding model, whose faults are profound but hidden behind the ‘needs-based’, ‘sector-blind’ slogans.
One of the main features of the SRS funding model, which is effectively just a rebadged version of the Howard Government’s socio-economic status model, is the variation of funding for non-government schools according to the median income of their parents. Schools where the median income (or ‘capacity to contribute’) of parents is high will find the base funding of students reduced by as much as 80 per cent; schools where the capacity to contribute of parents is low will have it reduced by the minimum amount (10 per cent). The difference in funding is meant to be made up by school fees, based on the assumption that wealthier parents have greater capacity to make up that difference, though the income of parents rightly has zero effect on the basic government funding of government schools.
The system is slowly being phased in, to allow schools to transition over time, with full implementation expected by 2029. What it means is that schools at the upper and middle parts of the parental income spectrum will find budgets getting tighter each year for the next few years. Parents at those schools will likely find their school fees increasing accordingly.
The main issue with this model is that, rather than creating a fairer and more equitable school system, it will likely further entrench class divides within the system. As fees rise, parents from well-off families might still decide that sending their children to non-government schools is worth the extra cost. However, those with less means (already stretched by increasing mortgage and other living expenses) will find it increasingly difficult to afford fees.
The worst affected schools will be those whose parents earn higher incomes but which have kept their fees low so that poorer families may also enrol their children in them. The presence of higher income families will cut their government funding, forcing them to put up their fees and thus drive the lower-income families out of them.
Even a school with many relatively low-income parents will find it difficult to maintain low fees for students from poorer families, given most of those who can afford to send their children to that school will not be from the lowest income brackets (hence reducing their SRS funding overall).
To be clear, this is what we will be seeing playing out over coming years, and the effects won’t be felt just in the non-government sector. Government schools in middle-income areas in particular will find the demands on places increase, as local non-government schools become progressively less affordable for lower-income families.
However, this doesn’t need to be the case. We might have taken a wrong turn (after a series of wrong turns), but there’s a way to create an education system that is fair and equitable, in which both government and non-government schools work together to educate all students.
The big obstacle to fair funding is the way in which we conceptualise public education. Generally, people conceive of it as education in schools owned by the government. We need to see it as education which is accessible to the public. The comparison would be how we see public health as health accessible to the public and happily pay Medicare rebates to private doctors for providing health care and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme money to private chemists for dispensing prescriptions. Reconceptualising education in this way would require a change in thinking, not just of the government but also the non-government education sector.
The one stakeholder that might lead this change of thinking is the Catholic education sector. Not only are they the largest non-government education entity, they also represent schools at all levels. One way that the Catholic education sector might go about boldly shaking up education funding in Australia and setting out a pathway to a better and more sustainable system is to embrace the idea that they are part of a ‘public’ education sector offering education that is accessible to the public. Some ways this might be done include:
- promising to take on a priority basis and free of fees any student in out-of-home care and any student with a disability;
- working to achieve 20 per cent of Catholic school enrolment coming from the bottom quartile of the SES levels;
- capping primary school fees at, say, $1,000 and secondary school fees at, say, $2,000 — lower, if possible;
- accepting the same teaching loads and class size maxima as apply in each jurisdiction’s government schools;
- introducing a classroom teacher category equivalent to the learning specialists in Victoria to keep the best teachers full-time in the classroom;
- ending the Choice and Affordability Fund by redirecting the money to a genuinely needs-based funding scheme.
In essence, the Catholic system would be offering to take on about as great a proportion of more-costly-to-educate students as the government system, to become more accessible to poorer families and to forego any cost advantage from treating its teachers less well than government schoolteachers are treated.
In return, all Catholic and other participating non-government schools — all of which could be called partnership or community schools — would receive the full schooling resource standard. No longer could the government cut the SRS for students with a lower SES, a disability or an Indigenous background just because they attended a school with middle-class parents.
Disadvantage loadings would be paid in full as they are now. The Catholic character of such schools would be protected. If a few high-fee Catholic schools wanted to stay out of the partnership system because they wanted to compete with high-fee non-Catholic schools, they could.
The National Catholic Education Commission should consult with its state bodies on details. In the end, we would have a system like New Zealand in which Catholic schools are almost fully funded by the government in return for very low fees and thus accessibility.
In the ongoing debate about funding of non-government schools, it’s crunch time as new SRS arrangements take hold in many schools across Australia. But it’s not too late to change course. Instead of an education system increasingly divided by class, the Catholic education sector could offer the government a new paradigm for Australian education: a new conception of public education with every school free to maintain its own character.
Chris Curtis is a former teacher and university tutor who has retained an interest in education and the only person in the country who put a funding model to the Gonski panel, which ignored it.
Main image: Chris Johnstone illustration.