You think there’s no divide in school funding? Take this history lesson

Public schools do not need three swimming pools, rowing sheds, iconic buildings and geography excursions to Antarctica. But they must have full provision of the basic requirements of education for their students to have “an equal chance at the best life possible”, an aspiration embraced by Associate Professor David Hastie, of Alphacrucis University College, in his column last week.

The fact is that public schools starved of resources have difficulty offering face-to-face teaching in the most demanding senior school subjects, let alone the full range of educational experience in the arts, physical education and competitive sport. The Kings School, meanwhile – receiving public funding worth tens of millions of dollars – boasts that it has 17 playing fields; surely every public school needs at least one.

The school funding debate is far from settled.Credit: Fairfax photographic

I agree entirely with Hastie’s aspiration for all students, but his other arguments about school funding cannot go unchallenged.

He claims that private schools are not overfunded at the expense of public schools. Public schools in all Australian states (though not in the ACT) are at 90 per cent or less of the Schooling Resource Standard, to which they and the Commonwealth committed following the Gonski Review (2011), while non-government schools in all states (not in the Northern Territory) receive more than 100 per cent. Does Hastie really propose that governments simply stump up more taxpayer money for public schools, rather than take it from overfunded private schools?

Second, Hastie says Australia spends more public funding on private schools than other OECD countries because Australia has more of them. He fails to acknowledge that this is because in the past 30 years, federal and state governments have encouraged the growth of non-government schools at the expense of public schools to shift the cost of education from the public to the private purse.

This has been achieved by per capita grants to private schools, funding for capital works, the granting of charitable status and tax concessions for donations. The Albanese government recently rejected a Productivity Commission recommendation to remove the tax-
deductibility status of the more than $200 million in donations annually received by private schools.

Third, while stating that non-government schools in many European countries receive full public funding, Hastie ignores the attached conditions: they are subject to stringent government regulations concerning school operations, of which the most demanding are restrictions on private funding, and the implementation of non-discriminatory enrolment practices. In England, 93 per cent of schools, including faith-based schools, are government-funded. Other schools such as Eton receive no public funding and are not subject to the same government regulations.

Such provision is superior to our unique and absurd arrangement of public school systems, faith-based school systems and independent schools, wholly or partially funded by two levels of government, the states and the Commonwealth.

Fourth, Hastie makes the astonishing claim that “according to our Constitution, almost all state school funding comes from the states, and almost all private school funding comes from the Commonwealth”. The Constitution makes no reference to education: the facile mantra about Commonwealth and state funding responsibilities is from the Howard era. Hastie exonerates the Commonwealth and blames the states for the underfunding of public schools. The real problem is not so much lack of funds (the total annual all-governments funding is more than $60 billion), but that the funding is not distributed according to genuine need.

Fifth, it is nonsense to say the private/public school arrangement is not a divide, but a settlement that has existed for 150 years. The history of Australian education – one of sectarian conflict and strife – proves otherwise. Much to the concern of the Catholic Church, colonial funding of non-government schools largely ceased in the 1880s and was not resumed by state governments until the second half of the 20th century. The Commonwealth started providing non-government school funding only in 1964. Countless bishops would rise from their graves in protest at Hastie’s assertion.

It is obvious to any fair-minded observer that our current school funding arrangements fail to ensure “that all citizens have an equal chance at the best life possible”. If achievement of that goal means reducing taxpayer funding to overfunded private schools, so be it.

Dr Ken Boston AO is a former director-general of education and training in NSW. He was a member of the Gonski Review of School Funding.