NSW schools set to have funding slashed revealed: full list

Private schools are set to have their financial support cut as the government launches a new system to allocate funding. Find out how your school scores.

The biggest winners and losers from complicated school funding agreements have been revealed after the government scored parents’ ability to pay by looking up their ATO data for a residential address.

The new system which is called the Capacity to Contribute Scores was previously based on the average income for an individual in a suburb where they lived, but the new system averages out the individual incomes of the address a student is living at.

That has meant schools with high earning parents that previously went under the radar are set to have their funding slashed under the complicated formula that uses a sliding scale to allocate total government funding depending on their allocated score.

Private schools now found to have higher income scoring parents include Newington College in Stanmore that charges up to $36,770 a year which had their score bumped from 119 to 143.

The $39,930 a year Scots College in Bellevue Hill jumped 23 points this year from 124 to 147. Picture: AAP IMAGE/ Danny Aarons

Under the scoring system, every point a school goes up reduces their per student government funding. After a school goes past an affluence score of 125, that means they just get the same amount of money per student.

Similarly once a school scores 93 or under, the funding does not continue to increase but remains the same per student.

The $39,930 a year Scots College in Bellevue Hill jumped 23 points this year from 124 to 147, once ATO data was taken into account.

Nearby Kambala jumped 22 points on the sliding scale from 125 to 147.

Newington College in Stanmore has been found to have higher income scoring parents.

But other ritzy private schools revealed that the parents weren’t trousering the big incomes the government thought they were based on the suburb they live in.

That includes Pymble Ladies College which went from a score of 125 to 122 while parents at the King’s School were not the high flyers like parents at other GPS schools with a score of just 117 — which went up one point between 2021 and 2022.

Centre for Independent Studies education researcher Glenn Fahey said tracking ATO data via the Direct Measure of Income method was not necessarily the fairest way of funding schools because it did not provide long term certainty about how much funding a school would receive.

“The capacity to pay measure is also unfair in that it only targets non-government schools. At the same time, there are many government schools — mostly in more advantaged areas — where funding is arguably inflated compared to competing non-government schools,” he said.