Newington College bequestors pen ‘please explain’ over Sydney private school’s poor HSC results

Top dollar donors and alumni of a prestigious Sydney private school have written a fiery letter to the school’s head demanding a ‘please explain’. Find out what they said.

Donors to the pricey Sydney private school Newington College in Stanmore are feeling “fragile” over its academic record. Picture: Justin Lloyd

Top dollar donors and former members of the Newington College council have issued the elite private school’s headmaster a ‘please explain’ over declining academic results under his watch.

The six signatories to a letter obtained by The Daily Telegraph describe themselves as “long-time supporters and financial benefactors” to the $42,000-per-year Stanmore institution, amid concerns about the school’s slide from as high as 73rd place in the HSC rankings under previous headmaster David Mulford to as low as 179th under current head Michael Parker.

“Since you began as Headmaster in 2019, the College has plummeted 52 places and is now languishing,” the letter addressed to Mr Parker states.

“A single poor academic year can be excused, but the negative trend is obvious.”

The letter includes graphs, compiled from HSC league tables, positioning Newington as inferior to its Great Public Schools (GPS) brethren and comparing the College to others which offer the International Baccalaureate – considered to be a significant factor in a private school’s rank due to the brightest students picking the more demanding IB program.

However, the school disputes the writers’ ‘evidence’ of a declining, saying the basis of the letter is inaccurate and results have in fact improved since 2019.

Newington College has only broken into the top 100 schools in the state — based on the percentage of its students that achieve the highest band in the HSC — once since 2018.

The six co-authors, all former students turned successful businessmen and politicians who have contributed financially to the College since graduating, urged Mr Parker to rationalise the results and “restore the fragile confidence that College benefactors have in the current school leadership”.

Newington College Headmaster Michael Parker.

“Please understand that we write out of deep respect and love for Newington College,” the authors wrote.

Each of the six men — including Ian Webster, a College Council member between 2002 and 2011, Greg Mitchell, who served on the board from 1994 to 2022, Phil Holey, a councillor between 2003 and 2018, the Hon Robert Webster AM, who not only served on the Council until 2021 but is also a former parliamentarian and leader of the National Party — are currently or have been members of Newington’s ‘Founders Society’, an informal group of old boys who have left bequests to the school in their will.

Mr Webster said a “central theme” of those bequests is to fund means-tested bursaries for gifted students who wouldn’t have the financial means to attend Newington otherwise, and that declining academic standards puts the whole scholarship system at risk.

A graph was included in alumni's letter to Newington College Headmaster Michael Parker, comparing Newington's HSC ranking to other IB schools.

“The academic commitment to the education of boys is the most important, though not the only, aspect of investment in a Newington education,” Mr Webster said.

“As the standard falls, so too does the attractiveness and worth of the bursaries that has become such an important part of the motivation by donors over the last ten years.”

The former students believe the current headmaster has allowed the school’s transition to coeducation to become a “distracting and demanding exercise” taking Mr Parker’s focus away from “the day-to-day running of the school,” Mr Webster said.

“One would hope that he takes our concerns seriously.”

Hundreds of members of the Newington Old Boys Union crammed into the Wesley Conference Centre in Sydney earlier this year for a special general meeting sparked by the co-ed debate. Picture: Jonathan Ng

A spokeswoman for Newington College said the letter’s basis was “inaccurate”, in part due to the number of Year 12 students taking the IB doubling since 2016.

“Newington’s Year 12 academic results have improved since 2019 and are amongst their strongest since 2001,” she said.

“It is more accurate to use the ATAR as a meaningful measurement shared by both the HSC and IB. In 2023, the mean ATAR was 83.51 which was the College’s highest since the ATAR began in 2009.”

The school is also “looking to … further the improvements” by offering Year 9 and 10 courses developed by the UK’s Cambridge University.

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