After the British came to Australia in 1788, schooling was initiated by Church of England clergy in the colony of NSW. Some decades later, a Catholic Bishop commenced the Catholic system. In the compact of 1880, the Church of England gave up its schools to the government in response to the right for clergy and their representatives to teach Christian faith, as mediated through the Church of England, in government schools for an hour a day. This is what we now call Special Religious Education (SRE, or ‘Scripture’). These were the days of sectarianism (Protestant vs Catholic). This is not the same as secular. The tensions of the time were not between faith and secular humanism; rather, they were between different brands of faith. As the Church of England was then regarded as the state faith, Catholic schools, some of them with strong Irish influence and antagonism to the British rule of Ireland, continued their schooling system outside of the government sector.
The next few decades saw a number of Church of England (now called Anglican), Methodist and Presbyterian schools established (the Anglican Bishop, Alfred Barry, for instance established St Andrew’s Cathedral School in 1885 and Shore in 1889). Only the largest of these have survived into the 21st Century. Meanwhile, great Catholic schools were established, particularly by the Jesuits, as well as smaller Diocesan schools attached to particular Catholic churches.
The real origin of what can be called ‘the Funding Wars’ dates from 1962. A government inspection of a Catholic school in Goulburn found the school defective in its bubbler and toilet amenities. The school was put on notice with a demand that these be fixed. In response, the Catholic Bishop of Goulburn, aware that the repairs could not be afforded, promptly closed all Catholic schools in the Diocese and through a Bishop’s encyclical, read out in each church, he instructed his parishioners to enrol their children immediately in the closest government school. The government sector could not cope with this flood of new enrolments. This was the beginning of ‘State Aid’ to non-government schools. This was followed into the next decade by the Whitlam government at federal level providing funding to schools for all types, for Science laboratories and libraries. Further to this, the Schools Commission was established to consider further capital grants. Nonetheless, in the 1980’s the non-government sector was still reasonably small. When the Howard government came to power, and developed its ‘Schools Choice’ policy, the non-government sector expanded rapidly, particularly in the outer urban areas of major capital cities where aspiration and social mobility were key factors in the growth of non-government schools, particularly Anglican.
Contemporaneous to these developments was the growth of Christian schools. The first Christian Parent Controlled School in Australia was Calvin Christian School in Tasmania in the 1960’s. This group of schools, of which Covenant is a member, is now called Christian Education National (CEN). There are 70 CEN schools currently in Australia. Christian Community Schools (now called Christian Schools Australia) developed as projects of particular local churches; currently there are some 150 CSA schools in the country. There are other Christian groupings such as Lutheran (mainly in SA and QLD where German immigration was significant in number), Adventist, small movements with particular educational philosophies such as Steiner and Montessori schools, Jewish schools and more recently Islamic schools.
This is the history. Now the money! The situation is complicated by the fact that most government money to government schools comes from state funding, whereas most government money to non-government schools comes from the federal government. It is therefore misleading to only quote the federal figures and represent that as funding of government schools. How then is what each non-government school gets calculated?
At state level, the Education Resource Index (ERI)
was established. This distributed schools according to their need to a 12-point scale. The difficulty with ERI was that essentially schools self-declared their position, after which it was very difficult to change their grading.
Early in this century, the federal government introduced the Socio-Economic Status (SES) measure. This determined school funding on the basis of parental need, based on an amalgam of income, occupation and education. The nation was broken into Collection Districts, clusters of homes where from taxation return data each district was given an average across around 30 homes. This was a broad-brush approach, where critics quite rightly said the only student from such a district might be from an outlier family (whether relatively rich or poor), which was not correctly represented by the average.
In the latter years of the Gillard government, businessman David Gonski, up until then Chairman of Sydney Grammar School and Chancellor of the University of NSW, was selected to form a committee of eminent Australian educators to resolve the funding wars. The Gonski Report called for ‘blind’ funding of schools, that is, without consideration of which sector they were from, on the basis of need as established by a School Resource Standard (SRS). This was a very worthy development. Unfortunately, governments of various persuasions have ‘wobbled’ over this, and because of the political need for there to be no losers (no angry voters at election time), too many non-government schools continued to be funded above their entitlement. The situation has been complicated by some systems of schools redistributing the money not according to need but to maximise enrolments. Governments anticipate that the Gonski findings will be fully implemented by 2029.
In recent years, at federal level the Direct Measure of Income (DMI) has been adopted. This is much more granular than the former SES, as it is not a neighbourhood average but feeds into high-powered computers the taxation return data of every individual parent of every non-government school. Even so, it has its critics in that it measures cashflow and in that sense may reward schools which have significant numbers of parents who are cash poor but asset rich. Schools have a DMI number on a scale from 70 (the most highly funded) to 130+ (parents who are affluent and hence have the ability to choose to pay for high fees for schooling without much government assistance). On top of such school funding there are additional ‘loadings’, such as for Indigenous students, remote schools and special schools structured to enrol students with significant disabilities. Capital grants (for building projects) have been available from the Block Grant Authority on the perceived basis of merit and need. It is this end of the spectrum, with its tree-lined drives, rifle ranges, indoor swimming pools, magnificent ovals and great social cache upon which critics of any government support of any non-government school focus, as if this was the entirety of the sector. The current situation is that in Australia each government school student attracts an average across the states of $26,140 from a combination of state and federal funding, whereas each non-government school student attracts $13,500. It is in fact a sliding scale based on need. At Covenant, where our DMI ranking is 109, each student attracts over $11,000 of combined government funding. This means that around 53% of the school income budget comes from parent fees. At the last school I led, a GPS school, 92% of the income came from parents and fundraising, 6% from the federal government and 2% from the state government. These figures are readily available on the MySchools website. It follows that if there were no non-government schools the cost of educating Australia’s children would be billions of dollars greater for government as they would have to pay ‘full freight’ without the top up of parent fees. Sometimes when critics of government funding of schools say that non-government schools are better funded, what they mean is the addition of government funding and fees parents pay from after tax dollars, surpasses government funding alone of government schools. This is of course a choice made by those parents.
What then of the argument that if all funding were withdrawn from non-government schools, governments would and could redistribute this money to government schools? The argument is a furphy. It assumes that non-government schools would survive, in that in schools, like Covenant, parents will be able to pay double the current fees in order to provide the finance necessary to sustain the school. In fact, and ironically, the independent schools that would survive are the very ones most attacked by the opponents of any government funding of independent schools. This is because those schools on perceived need receive very little government funding, and, despite assertions by critics, they receive no funding for building works. Indeed, if all students in non-government schools had to migrate to government schools due to a financial collapse of their present schools, they would attract not the average of $13k a head which non-government schools obtain but about double that amount, which is about $26k a student our government schools attract. This would be another Goulburn 1962 scenario. In fact, no government wishes to supercharge non-government school parents in opposition at election time, especially as there is a concentration of low to mid-fee independent schools in marginal electorates. What we are seeing is a slower and more stealthy reduction of government funding. As demographers predict the Australian population will grow from 28 million to 40 million over the next 15-20 years, governments need the non-government schools sector to not only remain, but to expand in number wherein parents fund the capital works and recurrent expenditure of new schools.
What we have seen since the 1980’s is the relentless growth of the non-government sector. Currently, nearly 38% of Australian children are educated in non-government schools. In Sydney and Melbourne, 50% of senior students are educated in non-government schools. The distribution of this is that independent schools, like Covenant, comprise around 18% of this figure, while systemic schools, such as Catholic Diocesan schools comprise over 19%.
Why do parents choose to pay fees when they could have their children educated at almost no cost in the government sector? Research shows that parents are seeking values, particularly Christian values, strong discipline and order, community, character development, extensive co-curricular and sporting opportunities, and alignment of their family ethos with those of other school families and the school itself. In effect, parents are exercising choice. To balance the ledger, it must be said that there are excellent government schools and many excellent teachers in government schools. In the end, parents vote with their feet! This partly because they seek the partnership required to fulfil the parenting maxim, “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
Regards,
Dr John Collier
Interim Principal
