Kylie Lang: If you can’t pay fees don’t send kids to private schools

A Brisbane private school is threatening to bankrupt parents who don’t pay fees, but as Kylie Lang writes, schools are not charities.

PRIVATE education comes at a significant cost, and parents have to be prepared to pay.

If you can’t afford it, send your kids elsewhere. Don’t expect the school to foot your fees.

The trustee of Edmund Rice Education Australia, trading as St Patricks College Shorncliffe, is the latest Queensland school applying to bankrupt parents for not paying their dues.

A Caloundra couple was ordered to pay EREA $24,225.35 by the Magistrates Court in Brisbane last September. The educational body is still waiting.

This comes after another case, in front of the Federal Circuit Court, involving Brisbane Girls Grammar School.

Brisbane Girls Grammar School is among those trying to reclaim unpaid tuition fees from parents.

The court last year was told that BGGS had spent six months unsuccessfully trying to locate two parents, formerly of Murrumba Downs, who’d been slapped with creditor’s petitions over unpaid fees.

The school’s board of trustees was seeking $36,371 from each, claiming the debt had been outstanding for years.

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I get that people go through tough times, finances falter and circumstances change, but the bottom line is that schools must be run like the businesses they are.

Yes, there is often leniency shown to parents who might be unable to meet fee commitments, to minimise disruption to their child’s learning, and that’s fair enough, but this should not be an ongoing saga that drains school coffers, takes up undue time of administrators, and goes on to incur huge legal costs.

Parents should factor in changes in financial circumstances before signing up for private school fees.

Critics of private and independent schools like to say these institutions already have too much money, but what they don’t understand is that much of this money is poured back into educational resources.

What’s more, the fees that parents pay effectively save the State Government many millions of dollars; dollars that taxpayers would otherwise be slugged with in order to educate those students.

This is also something that many critics choose to conveniently ignore.

As a Productivity Commission report revealed earlier this year, private schools receive much less public funding than free government schools.

Taxpayers give $6537 a year less to private school students than to those in the state system.

Queensland state school students attract $17,441 each in taxpayer funding to cover teacher salaries and school running costs, without covering buildings.

Their private school peers, on the other hand, receive $10,977 each, with fees covering the educational shortfall.

Teachers’ salaries account for the biggest chunk of the funding, at $8626 per student, according to the report, which is based on 2016-17 figures.

And if teachers were actually paid appropriately for the tremendous work they do, then this figure would be significantly higher, but I digress.

The bottom line is that private schools are not charities.

Every child deserves a decent education – and where possible, consistency in that education – but those who are schooled in the private system must have parents with the propensity and the will to pay.

Email Kylie Lang