Prompted by the announcement on school funding I thought I would look at the facts in my local area.
I live in an area with a preponderance of schools, particularly high schools. There are 14 high schools within an easy commute of my house – eight of them within the 2km that the government says a high school student should walk before a bus pass is issued (only one of those eight and three of the 14 are comprehensive government high schools that will take all comers).
The Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) is an estimate of how much total public funding a school needs to meet the educational needs of its students, as recommended by the 2011 Gonski Review of Funding for Schooling. The SRS is made up of a base amount for every primary and secondary student, along with six loadings to provide extra funding for disadvantaged students and schools.
The base amount is set at $10,953 for primary students and $13,764 for secondary students in 2018.
According to the Myschool website, not one of the primary or secondary government schools in my area was funded to that standard, either by state and federal government funding alone, or including the contributions by parents. My area is well above average – the ICSEA (Index of Community Socio Economic Advantage) for all of those schools is well over the average of 1,000, with an average of the schools in my sample of around 1,175). All numbers below are the most recent available, 2016 (and a larger table is shown at the bottom of this post).
All of the independent private schools charged fees higher than that amount – at least 50% higher. The highest parent contribution received per pupil was for Redlands – just over $31,000 per annum. But all of them also received government recurrent funding per pupil of an average of $3,500 (Redlands received just over $3,000 per pupil).
And the catholic schools? My area is interesting – it includes a couple of “traditional” parish schools, but also some very upmarket ones. All of them got a fairly close range of government funding per pupil – a range of $7,000 (St Aloysius, Kirribilli) to $9,500 (Marist College North Sydney). St Aloysius, which covers primary and high school, receives an average of just over $16,000 per pupil per year from parents. Marist receives an average of $5,500 per pupil per year from parents.
In most areas of federal government spending, the Australian government has a very targeted approach.
This article from Andrew Leigh (who I’m quoting because he is an economist, even though he is also Shadow Assistant Treasurer) explains it better than I can:
Put simply, a dollar spent in the Australian social security system does more to reduce inequality than a dollar spent in any other welfare system in the world.
As the Australian National University’s Peter Whiteford has shown, this didn’t happen by accident. Our pension has both an income test and an assets test. Unemployment benefits are set at the same level regardless of how much you were earning when you lost your job. We stopped paying the Baby Bonus to millionaires. One reason that so many people were critical of Tony Abbott’s parental leave plan is that it was a wage-replacement model, which gave the most to those who earned the most.
The result of so much targeting is that the size of government in Australia is considerably smaller than in most advanced countries. Put together the spending done by local, state and federal governments, and you’ve got 36% of the economy.
Figures published by the advanced-country OECD put us second-lowest of 29 countries, with only Switzerland spending less. Government in the US makes up 38% of the economy. In most developed countries, government is over 40% of the economy. In eight advanced nations, government is over 50% of the economy. A targeted welfare system means Australians pay a lot less tax than citizens in most rich nations.
Generally, people and institutions are only funded if they need the money. But education is an exception. Very rich institutions are still funded, even if they are already receiving income multiple times the amount required to do their jobs.
Some would argue that the children of rich parents who go to public schools are getting too much. Should they be contributing also? But education is a public good, a bit like roads. You don’t have to use a public road, but everyone contributes to it. That means that until we have funded the public system appropriately (which we clearly haven’t, even according to the standards set by our governments), we shouldn’t be giving extra to the private system.
As John Green says:
Public education does not exist for the benefit of students or the benefit of their parents. It exists for the benefit of the social order.
We have discovered as a species that it is useful to have an educated population. You do not need to be a student or have a child who is a student to benefit from public education. Every second of every day of your life, you benefit from public education.
So let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools, even though I don’t personally have a kid in school: It’s because I don’t like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people.
This is the clearest and best thing I’ve read about the school funding debacle, Jennifer. Hopefully you can get it published in a more public forum such as The Conversation or even a daily newspaper.