This is a summary of a paper showing that full taxpayer funding of private schools sujbect to them charging no fees will not increae equity in education. The full paper can be dowloaded below.
A critical question in assessing the proposal of Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor to fully fund private schools, subject to them not charging fees and allowing open enrolments is whether and to what extent it would increase equity in education. Even in the highly unlikely event that any private school system is prepared to give up its current resource advantage over public schools, it is equally unlikely to increase equity in education.
To see this, we must be clear on what is equity in education. SOS long ago adopted a dual equity objective which was also adopted by the Gonski review of school funding. It comprises an individual and social goal.
- All students should achieve a Year 12 Certificate or its equivalent;
- Students from different social groups should achieve similar average school outcomes.
Despite their significant resource advantage over public schools, Catholic and Independent schools perform no better than public schools after adjusting for different social composition. In some cases, they do worse in achieving equity goals.
Successive reports on Australia’s results in the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that, after adjusting for student and school socio-economic background, results in Catholic school are significantly below those of public schools while those of Independent schools are slightly below those of public schools. Catholic schools do no better than public schools even after only adjusting for student-level socio-economic background. Also, Catholic and Independent schools experienced the biggest declines in outcomes in PISA results since 2009.
In addition, several studies over the past 10 years show that the NAPLAN results of private schools are no better than those of public schools after adjusting for socio-economic background.
Given this poorer performance, it is very difficult to believe that attracting more disadvantaged students to Catholic and Independent schools by making them fee-free will improve equity in school outcomes.
First, private schools will have less income per student than now because they would be required to give up the resource advantage provided by their ability to charge fees. Second, on the most optimistic scenario, it will take considerable time to attract sufficient disadvantaged students to the private sector to give them a similar demographic profile to that of public schools. For as long as this takes, probably forever, fee-free private schools will have less income per student than public schools because their lower proportion of disadvantaged students will mean less per student funding from the Gonski disadvantage funding loadings.
If private schools cannot match public schools with the resource advantage they enjoy under the current funding system, how can we expect funding them at the same level as public schools will increase equity in education? There can be no confidence this will occur.
While sharing the concerns of many about very high social segregation between schools in Australia, the best we can do is to minimise its effects on school outcomes. Some degree of social segregation is inevitable because of geographical differences and a host of government policies such as housing and urban planning. In its starkest form, there will always be high social segregation between schools in the eastern suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne and those in remote areas.
Fully funding private schools could even lead to more religious segregation encouraging the expansion of schools catering for religious minorities such as Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs, the large majority of whom currently attend public schools. This does not fit well with current concerns about social cohesion.
A more direct and preferable way to reduce social segregation and its effects on school outcomes is to encourage more advantaged families to remain in public schools by ensuring that public schools are fully funded, and better able to deal with the challenges that they face.
It is not clear whether Tom and Chris propose full taxpayer funding of private schools includes funding for capital infrastructure. It not, private schools will have to continue to charge fees in order to fund capital development. If it does include government funding for capital, taxpayers could incur billions in capital funding of private schools in future. Catholic and Independent schools currently spend $6 billion a year on buildings and land.
If governments fund private school buildings and land, they should retain ownership of the assets to protect taxpayer interests. Transferring ownership to private schools could would allow them to sell off schools to gain more revenue and then apply for more capital funding to establish a new school. They could also transfer ownership to a related organisation to avoid any legal claims on the assets such as compensation for child sexual abuse, as in the case of Christian Brothers transferring schools to Edmund Rice Australia for $1.
SOS considers that full funding of public schools and reducing the overfunding of private schools as fundamental to increasing both aspects of equity in education.
In the first instance, full funding of public schools means funding them at 100% of their Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) including ending the “accounting tricks” of allowing state governments to claim a range of non-SRS expenditures as part of their share of funding public schools.
But full funding means more than this. It means increasing the disadvantage funding loadings. For example, the average low socio-economic status loading is about 0.20 at present but numerous research studies suggest it should be at least 1.0 or more, even up to 3.0. Such loadings are estimated as necessary to allow all students to achieve average standards. The loadings would have to be even higher to achieve social equity in education by eliminating the achievement gaps between rich and poor.
Similarly, ending the overfunding of private schools means more than reducing their current funding to 100% of their SRS. It means ending their special funding outside the model such as the $1.2 billion Choice and Affordability Fund, removing their tax-deductible status for building funds and foundations and removing exemptions to payroll tax and local government rates.
In addition, private schools are massively overfunded because of the flaws in their funding model. The current model ignores the substantial income that many parents in private schools receive from grandparents (the Bank of Mum and Dad) when assessing the capacity of parents to contribute financially. It also ignores hundreds of millions in donations, investment income, rental income and other income of private schools. As a result, the financial need of private schools is overestimated and they are overfunded.
Ending the huge underfunding of public schools and the overfunding of private schools would allow much progress in achieving equity in education. SOS has proposed a Gonski Plus model to do this. A four-pronged campaign is the way forward:
- Advocate full funding of public schools based on a Gonski Plus model.
- Highlight evidence showing that public school outcomes are equal to or surpass those in the private sector after adjustment for the different demographics.
- Re-affirm the social role of public schools in promoting a common understanding of social responsibility, human rights and social justice.
- Continue to document the huge achievement gaps between rich and poor and make the case for greater equity in student outcomes.
Trevor Cobbold & Ian Morgan
The authors thank their SOS colleagues Robyn Cummins and Grant Battersby for their helpful suggestions.