When I returned to Australia from England last year, two things struck me immediately about education. The first was the gulf between the public primary school our children had left behind in London and their new one in Sydney. The commitment of the staff was the same. Everything else—buildings, open spaces, resources, staff levels, curriculum, parental involvement, access to sport, music and drama—was so much better in Australia that it was almost painful to make the comparison.
Paradoxically, it became apparent that middle-class Sydney parents were suffering a crisis of confidence about the state system. Defections to private schools have already begun among our children’s peers, even at kindergarten level. A neighbouring primary school which offers an ‘opportunity class’ (OC) for high-achieving students in years 5 and 6 is packed to the rafters. But it was the flight from the comprehensive secondary system that was most striking. The word comprehensive may have English connotations, but it is necessary to use it because the kind of schools increasingly being sought by worried middle-class Australians cannot be defined simply as ‘non-government’.
A couple of years ago, friends told me of the secondary school options for their daughter. ‘All we want,’ they said, ‘is a normal school for a normal kid’. When the time came, however, they considered five schools: a public school specialising in the arts; a single-sex public school several suburbs away; a quirky private school; a Catholic school; and even a hugely expensive top-notch establishment.
I wondered why they had not considered the standard public school almost literally across the road. Was it the academic standards, or the social mix? Perhaps the principal had not impressed them, or the facilities were inferior? I was amazed to discover that the thought of checking out the school had not even crossed the parents’ minds. It wasn’t simply that it had a poor reputation—it did not even intrude on the view of their peer group who swapped anxieties about secondary schools.
In fact, I have found almost no parents who have even considered the local state secondary. We live in one of the safest Labor seats in the state. Attendance at the demonstrations against the Iraq war was virtually compulsory. Yet belief in the concept of the local, truly comprehensive public school, is dying a death among the liberal middle class here.
The evidence is not just anecdotal, of course. In the past 30 years, the proportion