Are private schools worth it?
NEW numbers out last week show again what an outlier we are in the way we choose to educate our children. According to the ABS, for the umpteenth year in a row more than a third of Australia’s school students are being educated in private schools.
Although comparing apples-withapples in this space is difficult, even a quick glance at OECD tables shows that we are extremely unusual. Of the English-speaking OECD countries, only the Irish send a higher percentage of their kids to private schools.
Even that stat is slightly misleading because almost all of the private schools there get most of their money from the state. In New Zealand, fullfee paying schools educate only 5 per cent of children while another 10 per cent are educated in governmentfunded “integrated” schools that charge parents about $1500.
Americans lie awake at night wondering how they are going to send their children to college, the bills for which are a major issue in this year’s presidential election. But most of them don’t fret about how they are going to pay for their kids’ high school — only 10 per cent are in private schools.
Which, incidentally, is a much higher percentage than for private schools in Canada and the United Kingdom. Many of us, I suspect, would look at these figures and wish they were not so. Aside from those who are spending their money for religious reasons — real religious reason that is, not the religious “values” most private schools offer — most people paying school fees wish they didn’t feel they had to.
Some of the more progressive ones are even violently in favour of state education. It’s just that in their own particular case, while they’re sure there are some very fine teachers at the school they’ve been zoned for and they do a very good job with the resources they’re given by the government, the fact is ….
You can mock middle-class hypocrisy but in some cases their reasons might even be reasonable. In some cases not. As to the question of whether we, as a society, are getting our money’s worth, the answer depends on your personal circumstances.
If your pride and joy is getting ready to head off to Oxford having just blitzed VCE at Melbourne Grammar, then the $150k plus it set you back probably seems like money well spent.
If five years after he left, your son is doing a bit of landscaping gardening and playing a bit of bass while you’re still paying your brother back the money he lent you to send him there, well, you might have a different view. Whether you are prepared to admit to it is of course another matter.
You might in your heart of hearts feel you were skinned by the school which, now you come to think of it, does seem to have a lot of money to advertise on the side of trams.
You might also wish you’d drunk better wine and taken that trip to the Amalfi Coast you could never quite afford. You might even bring it up at Christmas after you’ve had a few.
But what you can do aside from tell yourself the outcome might have been even worse if you’d sent to them to the local high school?
Just hope that one day, one of their more successful former classmates helps them into a job, perhaps in real estate, politics or journalism — areas of life that traditionally haven’t required much in the way of education.
We kid ourselves when we plan our child’s education that we are making an informed purchase. But choosing a school isn’t like a picking car or a phone plan. Sure, you can compare NAPLAN scores but they’re not really much use because they only really tell you how a school performs on average, not how your child will go there. It might well be the case that little Olivia or Noah would have shined wherever you sent them because they really are that special.
There is no way of knowing after the fact. Just as there is no real way of knowing how well your kid is going to go until the results arrive in January.
Even asking friends with older kids about their school experiences isn’t much use and not just because they might be reluctant to admit they made a bad decision.
Really, it’s a lottery and the only absolute certainty is that a kid called Xu is more likely to top VCE Chinese (Second Language) than one called Campbell.
That and the fact that if we were to build a school system from scratch today, it wouldn’t look anything like the school system we have.
REALLY, IT’S A LOTTERY AND THE ONLY ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY IS THAT A KID CALLED XU IS MORE LIKELY TO TOP VCE CHINESE (SECOND LANGUAGE) THAN ONE CALLED CAMPBELL