Comprehensive schools carry a disproportionate burden of disadvantage

The belief that equal access to education is the path to self-betterment has been shaken by the flight to private schools and selective public schools leaving the public comprehensive system to shoulder the burden of economically, socially and educationally disadvantaged students.

Since the Gonski Report alerted Australia to huge inequities in education 13 years ago, governments have sought to redress the imbalance and additional billions of dollars of “needs-based” funding has poured into schools.

How’s that going? Not too well. The former head of the Department of Education, Michele Bruniges, has proposed the disproportionate concentration of poor students in the public system could be addressed by curbing new selective schools and asking private schools to open their doors to less advantaged children.

Dr Michele Bruniges, the former head of the Department of Education.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Research showed that in 2017, about 430,000 students attended a school with a high concentration of disadvantaged students, but that number had jumped to 555,000 students by 2023.

In a speech to be delivered at Wednesday’s SMH Schools Summit 2025, designed for teachers, school principals and education sector leaders to explore cutting-edge policies and evidence-based approaches, Bruniges said 94 per cent of Australian schools with a high concentration of disadvantage were public schools. In NSW, that figure was 97 per cent. “The impact of this trend is that it creates a cycle of negative perceptions that undermine the bonds that tie children, their families and their schools to their community,” she said.

Bruniges said the inequity in the schooling system was incompatible with Australia’s self-image of a fair go, and there was a need to encourage a trend away from concentrations of disadvantage that could involve asking more schools that receive public funding to open their doors to children from less advantaged backgrounds and consideration of registering all new schools to be comprehensive, not specialist or selective.

She echoed Adrian Piccoli, the former state education minister in the Coalition government, who nearly 14 months ago warned Sydney’s selective schools should not grow with population, but rather selective streams in more comprehensive schools were a better way forward. “Selective streams within a school are a much better model. That’s better than pulling a student out from their local school and putting them somewhere in an entirely different school,” Piccoli said.

The selective public school system has served our state well. It has produced brilliant scientists, doctors, lawyers, engineers and school teachers among a vast number of professions. Governments from the late 1980s increased the number of selective schools and, particularly, this century, added selective classes to comprehensive schools. Now there are 21 fully selective and 26 partially selective public high schools in NSW, the highest number of any Australian state, and while a recent policy reserves 20 per cent of places for Indigenous and disadvantaged students, and those with a disability, they are predominantly filled with students from the quartile of socioeconomic advantage.

Such reforms may concern parents and students worried about shrinking choices, but alternatives need to be pursued. Concentrating disadvantaged students in one stream is unfair and debases our education system.

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