Australia’s school system will remain unfair while private schools can combine public funding, fees and selective enrolment practices, and a common framework is needed to give public education a genuinely level playing field.
Trevor Cobbold and Save Our Schools have made a welcome and vigorous response to our proposal for a common framework for all Australian schools (P&I 17 June). The essence of the common framework is that all schools should be eligible for full needs-based government funding as long as they don’t charge fees and they do adopt inclusive enrolment practices.
Firstly, it is important to note an essential area of agreement: a deep shared commitment to public education understood as “publicly owned, publicly governed and publicly accountable secular institutions operating under universal social obligations.” This form of education embodies values of solidarity and fairness, citizenship and community that are an essential part of a good society, and it urgently needs to be promoted and strengthened.
But, for those very reasons, our common framework proposal, if implemented, would not see private schools as part of public education systems. They would exist alongside public schools, as they do now – but with obligations and an operation which reflects their funding levels which are, for most schools, very close to (and sometimes more than) government funding of public schools with similar demographics.
That important clarification aside, our disagreement with Cobbold’s paper begins when we turn to the overarching framework that determines how public education systems co-exist alongside the two non-government sectors. The question is: what are the best conditions to enable public schools to flourish, given they inevitably exist in competition with privately-owned and operated (mostly) religious schools?
Our argument is that the status quo is inherently corrosive to the project of public education because it gives the non-government schools two kinds of competitive advantage: they are better resourced because they can charge fees in addition to generous public subsidies, and they can exclude, whether intentionally or otherwise, children who are more expensive to educate. Having to compete in this context fundamentally undermines the project of public education, exposing it to an inexorable dynamic of segregation and residualisation. This trend has reached exponential proportions in the last eight years.
Conversely, if all schools were resourced and regulated on a common basis, public education would be in a position to prosper. Because then the competition would be on its merits, not about a rigged policy environment. Of course, some people would still choose a religious school because that’s what they believe in, but not because it comes with better resourcing and an air of exclusivity. They would have neither if they were part of a common framework.
Here, Save Our Schools responds in three ways. Firstly, SOS views full public funding of religious schools as “destroying public education in the name of reform” and “jettison[ing] the foundation principles of public education.”
But this is mistaken. Public schools remain public schools. The change is to non-government schools which must take on commensurate public obligations in return for full government funding, just like non-government schools in many secular countries around the world (like Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands). In this fairer context public schools would get to operate on a level playing field in which neighbouring schools are resourced equivalently and face commensurate public obligations.
Secondly, Save Our Schools argues that the solution is to fully fund public schools and stop overfunding private schools. This is absolutely necessary – for the compelling reasons advanced by Trevor Cobbold amongst many others (including ourselves). But it is not enough. Even if public schools receive 100 per cent of their SRS entitlement, private schools will still enjoy total resource advantages through the combination of government subsidy and unregulated fees. This is not acceptable. And they’ll still be able to pick and choose their students. This is a continuation of the unlevel playing field, not a solution to it.
Thirdly, Save Our Schools says a common framework is not politically possible because “many private systems are highly unlikely to surrender the financial and structural privileges they currently enjoy.” There certainly are no guarantees. The creative policy challenge is to forge the best policy outcome with the most realistic chance of success.
The reason why the common framework proposal has a realistic chance of success is that it puts a big carrot on the table – full government funding. The non-government sectors are anything but a monolith, and this carrot is likely to strongly appeal to some sections, less so to others. It is more likely to appeal to parents who struggle to afford even modest fees and families for whom school fees are a major driver of bankruptcy. It is likely to appeal to the poor religious who are currently excluded from religious schools. It is going to have appeal to schools and system leaders who are genuinely concerned about the underrepresentation of the poor in their schools and the larger issues of social segregation across our schooling landscape.
A politician going to an election saying “I am going to address cost-of-living by completely removing one of the biggest pressures you are facing right now – school fees” is a plausible proposition. If some non-government school authorities reject this and insist on their right to charge ever-increasing fee, they are going to find themselves increasingly at odds with their own parent communities. They’ve also just undercut any appeal to “school choice” in defence of their existing privileges.
In this way, the common framework takes away the private school lobby’s rhetorical trump card in public debate. Whenever exclusivity and privilege is challenged, they do not attempt to defend the indefensible but change the subject. They present it as an attack on low-fee schools and make it a debate about the value of ‘choice’. And so they have been able to successfully hide taxpayer support for extremely wealthy schools behind the fig leaf of religious choice. The common framework undercuts this deceitful but effective tactic by advocating genuine choice accessible to all, not just those who can afford it, provided in a manner consistent with equity and overall student achievement.
Sure it will still be a huge challenge, but it has the ingredients to transform the conversation, the politics and the policy. Contrast this with the ‘Gonski Plus’ model proposed by Save Our Schools which limits “taxpayer funding of private schools to filling any gap between private income and the community resource standard.” This proposal imagines that politicians are suddenly going to summon the courage, capacity and political will to substantially cut private school funding. Such a scenario simply doesn’t reckon seriously with the politics of the issue.
On the plus side, the Save Our Schools proposal implicitly recognises that the fight for public education has to extend far beyond simply winning adequate resourcing, as essential as this is. We have to transform the unlevel playing field which has always compounded advantages for some and struggle for others.
Unless we do this, Australia will continue to have, as SOS rightly points out, “one of the most socially segregated education systems in the developed world.” We will only start to change this if we build on this urgent conversation about policy solutions that address the fundamental issues ailing our schools and which can open up new political space in which transformative change becomes possible.
Tom Greenwell is co-author with Chris Bonnor of ‘Waiting for Gonski: How Australia failed its schools’ and ‘Choice and Fairness: a common framework for all Australian schools’. He worked on research commissioned by the Review to Inform a Better and Fairer Education System.
Chris Bonnor AM is a former teacher and secondary school principal, a previous head of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council. He is co-author, with Tom Greenwell, of report Lessons from Canada, an equal school system is possible.