Private-school scholarships can transform individual lives, but selective admissions make success rates a poor measure of what schools achieve – and leave the hardest-to-help children largely invisible.
The Coalition’s spokesperson for Indigenous Australians, Julian Leeser, wants more disadvantaged Aboriginal students to attend private schools. His case rests on retention. Indigenous students in private schools remain enrolled through to Year 12 at a rate of 91.4 per cent, compared with 59 per cent across all school types. “What is it,” he asks, “that the non-government schools are doing that is so successful?”
It is a fair question, but aimed in the wrong direction. Retention is a cohort measure, not a record of individual students. It counts enrolments at the beginning and end, not whether they are the same students, and can technically exceed 100 per cent.
As education researcher Jessa Rogers points out, Year 12 attainment – the measure of completed schooling – still shows young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults trailing their non-Indigenous peers by more than 20 percentage points. We have no breakdown between private and public schools.
Leeser’s statistic tells us who remained enrolled. It tells us nothing about who was admitted, rejected, returned home or never encouraged to apply. That is the question philanthropy in Australian education too often avoids: who gets chosen to be helped, and what happens to everyone else?
Scholarships and boarding places are not handed out at random among disadvantaged children. Someone decides. The Australian Indigenous Education Foundation (AIEF), which helps fund Indigenous boarding places at leading private schools, requires applicants to be enthusiastic, likely to complete Year 12 successfully, and supported and encouraged by their parents. AIEF is candid that its scholarships are not for everyone. Yalari asks applicants from regional and remote communities to give 100 per cent to their education.
The same problem exists within public education. The Public Education Foundation does valuable work and its scholarships change individual lives. But its criteria include academic potential, positive attitude, high attendance, participation in school and community life, a personal statement, school report and principal’s reference. I have no argument with using limited funds responsibly. Nor do I question the donors’ generosity or the achievements of selected children. My concern is what these criteria do when combined.
They create a filter. The child most likely to win is already attending regularly, showing academic promise and supported by an adult who can negotiate the paperwork and make that potential visible. The child least likely is the one whose disadvantage appears as poor attendance, disturbed behaviour, an undiagnosed learning difficulty, family instability or mistrust of institutions earned through experience.
After more than four decades working in public education, much of it with children whose behaviour ensured they were rarely anyone’s first choice, I know which group needs the greater help. The difficult child is not less deserving. That child is often more damaged, less able to advocate and less capable of presenting disadvantage in the form a selection panel can reward. The child is also harder to turn into a photograph and a graduation story, yet is frequently the very child the scholarship was supposedly established to reach.
This is the child who disappears from the conversation. We hear about the scholar who flourished, the graduate who thanks her donors and the statistic showing private-school retention outperforming public education. We hear less about the sibling who was not put forward because no one could write the application; the student whose attendance ruled them out before its causes were considered; or the child who returned home during the year and vanished from the success story.
Philanthropy has begun to distinguish between need and what might be called investable need. It does not necessarily select the child who needs the most support. It selects the child whose need can be accompanied by the most convincing promise of success.
That distinction matters when completion and retention rates are presented as proof that a scholarship, or a private school, works. If students were selected partly for academic potential, attendance, attitude and family support, their later completion cannot be credited entirely to the scholarship. Some of the predicted success was present before the offer was made. Selection becomes an apparent educational achievement.
A meaningful evaluation would tell us how many applied, who was rejected, what influenced the decision, how many withdrew and what happened afterwards. It would compare recipients with similarly placed young people who received no scholarship. The published success stories and headline retention rates I have seen do not allow that.
The comparison with public schools is especially unfair. Private schools educate a selected population and retain the right to decide who fits. Public schools accept the children who arrive, including those carrying complex combinations of disability, trauma, poverty, disrupted behaviour and family breakdown. These residualised public schools are expected to repair problems they did not create, often without the resources required. Comparing their results with a selected intake is not evidence of private-school superiority.
Scholarships also return something to those who give: a named award, a photograph, a graduation story and an ambitious young graduate. The donor sees what the money achieved; the charity reports a measurable outcome; the private school displays its social contribution. Government points to a life transformed without repairing the system that produced the disadvantage.
The generosity may be sincere and the benefit profound. But generosity and justice are not the same. The child left behind has no photograph, annual-report profile or name attached to the absence. That child remains in the underfunded conditions governments and philanthropy have agreed to work around rather than repair.
If the Coalition, or any organisation in this area, genuinely wants better outcomes, the answer cannot be to become more efficient at picking winners. Every provider should be asked: how many applied, who was rejected, which qualities predicted selection, how many returned home, and what became of equally disadvantaged children who received nothing?
These are uncomfortable questions because they disturb a comforting story. Philanthropy can change an individual life, and we should welcome every life it changes. But only public policy can change the conditions governing every life. Until we hold firmly to that distinction, we will continue celebrating the children chosen to escape while leaving behind those judged too difficult, too disrupted or insufficiently promising to take with them.
John Frew worked in public education, including as foundation principal at a secondary school for students with Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Disturbance. John has authored numerous books the latest being ‘Neuroscience and Teaching Very Difficult Kids’. Since retiring, he has continued to comment on social issues.