How the bank of nan and pop is making our polarised school system even worse

At my old high school, in the 1990s, there wasn’t a single blade of grass. Year 11 had a patch of dust that perhaps once hosted plant life. There may have been a few weeds peeking through brickwork. I remember mostly concrete, much of it damp.

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

They weren’t ideal conditions. There was no room for sport during breaks, and adults worried the cold concrete would give us piles. But that patch of dust was the scene of many lively debates about life and politics by curious, clever students. The miniature hall hosted rousing performances. And the teaching in classrooms with broken fans and chewing gum on the underside of desks was, for the most part, first-rate. A lot can be done with little when there’s passion, dedication and purpose.

Then again, perhaps I’d be more successful if I’d attended a school with freshly cut lawn. Perhaps my love of literature would be greater if our books had been stored in a library that looked like a Scottish castle. Our concert band won a national title, but might we have gone global if we’d practised in a hall designed by an acoustic engineer? Perhaps my Latin teacher, a huge influence on my life, would have been better at her job if she’d delivered some classes in Rome.

I’ve been privately told that at one school, half of the fee notices are sent directly to grandparents.

We’ll never know. I’m tortured, now, by thoughts of my lost potential. But there are plenty of people who do think these trappings make a significant difference to schooling, because they are willing to devote more than $50,000 to a single year of a lone child’s education to ensure access to them.

Six years ago, the Herald reported that fees at Sydney’s most expensive private schools were about to reach $38,000. This year, as education editor Lucy Carroll reported last week, they’ll hit $51,000. In Victoria, Geelong Grammar’s year 12 parents will pay $52,612. Over the time it takes a student to finish high school, the fees for the final year at Sydney’s most economically elite independent schools have grown by $13,000, while the cost of educating a student at Victoria’s wealthiest schools has risen by about $7764.

Annual fee rises were once 2 to 3 per cent. In NSW now they’re hitting 7 to 10 per cent, so expect fees to exceed $60,000 in the next few years. Anyone signing up two kids to a high-fee private high school now will be looking at more than $600,000.

Every time I read annual fee stories, I’m flummoxed by the same question: who can afford this? How do parents, struggling with skyrocketing house prices, find that kind of cash? And still more for the uniforms, and the camps, and the trips to orphanages in Cambodia?

The answer is grandparents; those same cashed-up Boomers who have inflated the housing market by buying houses for their children. The self-funded retirees who benefit from myriad tax breaks, and who want to ensure their grandchildren have the “best” education. There’s no data on grandparent contributions, but, anecdotally, it’s widespread. Jenny Branch-Allen, president of the Australian Parents Council (which represents private school parents), suspects it’s common. “[Parents want] to be able to continue their own children’s education in their school of choice, and I think grandparents are sometimes called upon to make sure that can continue to happen.” I’ve been told privately that at one school, half of the fee notices are sent directly to grandparents.

School fees aren’t driven by the same market forces as real estate. Schools say they calculate fees based on staff costs (which spiked in NSW after the public sector teachers were given a significant wage rise), the cost of upkeep and capital works. But the grandparent contribution stretches schools’ expectations of what families can afford. If the perennial private school puzzle is how high fees will get before families are forced to vote with their feet, the answer, if grandparents are footing the bill, is a lot higher still.

I do wonder whether families are so busy worrying about the “best” education, that they don’t stop to think whether they’re getting their money’s worth.

Studies over many years have shown the biggest influence on a child’s schooling success is their parents’ education. We know, too, that if advantaged students are grouped together, that effect is enhanced (grouping disadvantaged kids together enhances their disadvantage, too, the other part of this problem). So it’s nothing to do with the size of the school’s swimming pool, and everything to do with the cohort. You could send the same kids to my old dust bowl and their outcomes would be just as good. Results at selective schools and public schools in areas where families actually use them provide plenty of evidence.

I wonder, too, what this educational extravagance is teaching children. What happens when they move into the real world? When they have to pay their own rent (but perhaps granny and pa are there for that, too) or their office doesn’t have a state-of-the-art gym? By setting children up for a five-star life, is it ultimately failing them by not teaching them how to live alongside different types of people, and adapt to less comfortable circumstances? How do the kids themselves square it all with the schools’ founding religious ideals of supporting the children of the marginalised?

The polarisation of the country’s school system is the result of four decades of state and national policy decisions. NSW’s embrace of selective schools created a two-tier system that encouraged parents to see comprehensive schools as an option of last resort and helped drive them into private education. Former prime minister John Howard’s push for choice resulted in national funding mechanisms that helped high-fee schools engage in the facilities arms race.

Parents should be protesting in the streets about this. But it’s the boiling frog syndrome writ large; changes in education happen so slowly that the impact doesn’t become apparent for years, at which point it has already become the status quo.

Europeans look at Australia’s schools in the way we look at the US health system, horrified at how we’ve stratified something that should be fair and free. Forty years ago, parents didn’t begin stressing and saving for high school in the labour ward. We didn’t divide our children into schools for the wealthy, schools for the smart and schools for the underprivileged. We didn’t bankrupt ourselves, or dip into our parents’ retirement accounts. We sent kids to the school down the road.

And so Australia finds itself one of few countries whose governments have not only created, but also funded, an education system in which the wealthy have the most resources and the disadvantaged have the least. We should be demanding change. Instead, we’re hitting up Nan and Pop.

Jordan Baker is chief reporter of The Sydney Morning Herald. She was previously education editor.

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