Growing gap between rich and poor schools is monumental

When four wealthy schools spend more than 1800 poor schools, should we reconsider,

WE are a weird mob. Incredibly, approaching a half a billion dollars was spent at just four Australian schools over the past five years on new facilities, renovations, Olympic-size swimming pools and the like. Our school funding system is unquestionably uniquely Australian. In New Zealand, Catholic schools are integrated into the state school system and all teachers are members of the same teacher unions. The schools retain their religious principles as they do in Australia and include these in their curriculum while adhering to the National Education Guidelines.

Schools in New Zealand are funded directly from the central government, unlike here where a complex opaque system of state and Commonwealth funding exists. Our Constitution states that the funding of schools is a state responsibility but 50 years ago prime minister Robert Menzies used Section 96 that allows the Commonwealth to assist states in anything it so chooses and Commonwealth involvement in the funding of schools began.

NZ does not subsidise student travel to school of choice and, if required, it is a cost for families. The NZ Ministry funds buses for families in rural areas in the same manner as does Tasmania but for those who travel outside their local district students are refused access to the buses that transport students to their local school. In Tasmania our state government provides $20 million annually to provide subsidised travel for students to travel anywhere to any school of choice.

NZ state schools which include all Catholic schools are fully government funded to pay for the salaries of staff and curriculum delivery. It’s only with property acquisition where financial assistance to the Catholic schools is not provided.

NZ’s private schools receive funding for curriculum costs but the schools pay for property and salaries. It is in the payment of salaries or recurrent funding where our key funding differences lie. About 3.4 per cent of students attend private schools in New Zealand whereas 14.6 per cent of Australia’s schools are independent and 19.6 per cent are Catholic. The number of private schools in NZ is also rapidly declining as the government integrates them into the state school system. These schools receive 25 to 40 per cent of their funding from the government and this covers the salaries of support staff only, but not the salaries of teachers. The costs to acquire property, buildings, upkeep and maintenance, etc and paying the salaries of teachers is derived from student fees.

Why our Commonwealth government pays the cost of salaries of those working in private schools is contentious, particularly when confronted with the latest My School data. Between 2013 and 2017 Australia’s four richest schools, Wesley College, Haileybury College and Caulfield Grammar from Victoria, and Knox Grammar

from NSW, teaching fewer than 13,000 students spent more on new facilities and renovations than the poorest 1800 Australian schools combined. It was a staggering $402 million from their own resources — fees — while our poorest 1800 schools that teach 107,000 students spent less than $370 million in total.

There is a gaping divide that separates the capital expenditure of Australia’s richest and poorest schools and efforts to address this by Labor and the Greens at election times have been unsuccessful. Mark Latham, Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten all overreached in their social reform agendas at election times and as a result over the past decade public funding to private schools has risen nearly twice as fast as public funding to public schools and there is nothing in place to prevent its continuation.

Half of the $22 billion spent on capital projects in Australian schools between 2013 and 2017 was spent in just 10 per cent of schools. Independent schools spent four times as much on capital works as public schools and nearly twice as much as Catholic schools in 2017. University of Sydney associate professor Helen Proctor has described these figures as “extraordinary”.

When confronted with this data, both the Catholic and independent school authorities quite rightly emphasise that the vast majority of capital spending in non-government schools — 92 per cent in independent schools and 85 per cent in Catholic schools — is funded privately, mostly by fees and school loans. Many would argue that as this is the case they have been over-funded by governments elsewhere.

The concern is not the Olympic-size swimming pools in high-fee, non-government schools, it’s that many and mainly government schools in Australia don’t have the basic facilities they need, especially in areas where population is booming.

Maori culture dictates that if you possess the ability to help, you have the responsibility to do so. If Australians also believe this, the question for those in Canberra is: What is to be done?