‘You can’t raise fees endlessly’: How new direction may save PMSA
Three years after a bruising scandal, the new boss of the PMSA reveals how it has changed how it operates, its way forward and the impact on Brisbane’s top schools including its fees.
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All but one of the board members from the bruising 2017 controversy that engulfed the governing body in charge of four elite Queensland schools have been replaced.
Morgan Parker, the new chair of the Presbyterian and Methodist Schools Association, says an expanded head office and a shake-up of the governing board is driving the schools’ recovery from the scandal.
Parker, who has been PMSA chair since March this year, says the new board is “amazing”.
“What we’ve done is retreated and gone in and rebuilt the machine, piece by piece,” says Parker, who has returned to his hometown of Brisbane after more than 20 years working internationally in real estate and investment.
“We are far from the finished article, the PMSA remains a work in progress, but we are putting in place the building blocks to perform the governance role that our stakeholders expect us to have been performing.”
The century-old PMSA runs four prestigious schools - Somerville House, Brisbane Boys’ College, Clayfield College and Sunshine Coast Grammar School.
A deep-seated discontent with the 2017 PMSA board spilled out publicly after the revelation of an alleged data breach and texts between the then PMSA chair, Robert McCall, and the PMSA’s then executive manager, Rick Hiley, in which they organised a meeting in a nude Korean-style bathhouse. Neither Hiley nor McCall have spoken publicly, but the PMSA investigated and cleared them of wrongdoing.
In the fall-out, the then principal of Somerville House, Flo Kearney, was stood down, prompting protests from the school community. Kearney later receiving a public apology. Hiley also left the PMSA. McCall resigned as chair of the PMSA in August 2017, before the controversy erupted publicly.
Mr Parker, a former BBC school captain who joined the PMSA board as a church-appointed director in April 2018, says although there was provision in the PMSA’s constitution in 2017 to have non-church appointed board members, there were none at the time of the crisis.
All three non-church appointed board positions have now been filled by Jane Madden, a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Bridget Cullen, a member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and Greg Eddy, the chief executive of King’s College at the University of Queensland.
The number of possible board members has been cut from 15 to 13, although there are only eight current appointments, and the time a board member can serve has been limited to nine years.
There have been changes to the powerful school councils, too, with one being the abolition of the requirement that a PMSA board member be the chair.
“The PMSA used to appoint those chairs of the schools and now we have three of our four schools with independent chairs,” Mr Parker says.
The remaining school council at Somerville House is expected to have an independent chair by the end of the year.
“What we are trying to create is a tiered governance model where schools have their own governance, with more community representation,” Mr Parker says.
The PMSA Group Office has expanded, which Mr Parker says will enable the PMSA to be future-focussed and capitalise on its economies of scale.
In 2017, there was an executive manager and two part-time secretarial staff.
There is now a chief executive officer, Sharon Callister, a chief financial officer, a quality and risk executive, a human resources executive, a strategy officer and a communications director.
Mr Parker, who is not paid as the PMSA board chair, denies he is creating a fiefdom, an allegation levelled by some in the school community.
He says the changes will build the capacity of the PMSA to weather changes in the education sector.
The cost of the Group Office is about $3 million annually, or about 2.2 per cent of the PMSA’s $140 million revenue pool.
“People can make a big deal about ‘Oh you’ve grown your office’ but I come back to the fact that if you know anything about business, a 2 per cent office cost is a non-event,” says Mr Parker, who sits on five other paying boards, including SunCentral Maroochydore, one of the drivers of the planned massive redevelopment of Maroochydore’s city centre.
“We’re increasing the financial literacy of the PMSA and increasing the level of professionalism in governance so that as the dynamics of the funding and business model evolve, we are at the forefront of understanding how to continue to be competitively positioned.”
Mr Parker says the PMSA is now negotiating enterprise bargaining agreements itself, rather than contracting recruitment to an external employment lawyer.
The changes would help “create greater mobility in our workforce, to provide better career progression”, Mr Parker says.
“We’re bringing a lot of order to where there hasn’t been order in the past.”
The schools’ economies of scale are being exploited, with negotiations underway for wholesale electricity agreements across the four schools and a move to green energy.
Members of Beyond PMSA, the lobby group that formed during the 2017 controversy, have pushed for the PMSA to be reformed under the Corporations Act.
The PMSA operates under Letters Patent, the document that establishes it as a body corporate, which Beyond PMSA says does not provide adequate financial transparency.
Mr Parker says such a change may happen in the future but it is not a priority.
“Merely changing the way you are incorporated does not fix the problems that existed in this organisation,” Mr Parker says.
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“The things that really matter to parents, staff and students, right here and now, we do not have obstacles to fixing. My pragmatic approach is to fix the things that need to be fixed, that you can fix.
“There are a myriad of obtainable, time urgent, tangible things that immediately needed to change and there continues to be a priority list of things that need to evolve. I don’t want to give the impression that we’re done. There are still many things that need to keep evolving.”
Mr Parker points to state schools such as Brisbane South State Secondary College – due to open next year at Dutton Park, near Somerville House, which will have a Biomedical Science Academy in collaboration with the University of Queensland – as worthy rivals to private schools.
“You can’t just keep raising school fees endlessly – and you want to attract the best teachers,” he says.
“We’ve got three sources of revenue, federal and state government and parents. That’s it. We know government funding is declining so if you’re in independent education, you need to be able to do more with less. You cannot understate the importance of what is coming and of readying yourself financially to be able to continue to perform at this level.”
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