Governments have fostered a sense of entitlement in private schools. They should be enforcing the principle of putting students first.
The UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child is clear: in all actions concerning children, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration. A recent article in The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 5 July, raised serious doubts about the extent to which Australia’s school system is upholding that principle.
Headlined “Schools take on entitled parents”, the article reported that principals of high-fee, highly resourced independent schools say parental entitlement has grown to the point where some parents behave as though they own and control teachers. The accompanying editorial was headed “Meddling parents do no favours for their children”.
The real question is whether they do actual harm.
It is not hard to imagine an aggressive parent who spends thousands buying their child a place in one of these schools treating that child with similar aggression:
I had to miss an important board meeting to go up to your school today and tell the headmaster to pull his head in – and now I want my $50,000 worth from you, in more homework and better exam results.
Some students, impressed by their parents’ willingness to put a headmaster in his place, may decide to use their own privileged status to bully others and get their own way. Others may simply cringe with embarrassment, damaged by their parents’ behaviour.
Schools across the country are reporting more aggressive behaviour from parents, largely reflecting the anxiety and anger that cost-of-living pressures have brought to many families. But few schools show anything like the sense of entitlement on display at the elite schools named in the SMH story, which are now trying to “wrest back control” in the face of “parent overreach”. At one Sydney school, parents must sign a charter agreeing to support the school’s decisions – a step the headmaster admitted would have seemed “radical” ten years ago. Radical or not, it’s a clear case of a school overreaching in the other direction.
While governments look on, these entitled schools influence the wider system. They sharpen the social pecking order among schools in ways that contribute to concentrating disadvantaged students in under-funded public schools – schools where students often miss out on music, sport and excursions that wealthy schools tout in their marketing.
Under policies maintained by both major parties, these wealthy schools can use their superior resources to draw teachers away from schools where they are needed far more by offering higher salaries and better conditions – and at a time when a worldwide shortage of teachers is hitting Australia hard.
High-fee independent schools also continue to draw substantial public funding from Commonwealth and state governments on top of their fees and other private income.
For the Albanese government, with its commitment to pursuing budget savings, there is no educational, social or economic rationale for continuing to provide this windfall to exclusive schools that charge fees at twice or more the level of the agreed Schooling Resource Standard (SRS). Consistent with its plans to ensure the quality and sustainability of the National Disability Insurance Scheme by removing dodgy providers, it could do the same for the school system by demanding that state governments strengthen registration requirements for private schools.
The headmaster who told the SMH that, over his career, the parent-teacher relationship has shifted from “at best a partnership” to “at worst a consumer sentiment” was spot on. That shift can be traced back to the Howard government, which introduced a private school funding model built around consumer choice and provider competition.
Under the influence of neoliberalism, governments have neglected their responsibility for prudent regulation to protect the interests of all students, allowing schooling to become more of a private and positional good than a public one.
It is hard to understand why Labor governments continue to tolerate this fiasco: class division dressed up in the cloak of religion; entitled schools engaged in performative charity while enjoying special tax status; and extravagant building projects consuming scarce construction labour and materials, which should be directed toward affordable housing.
As a small step forward in the interest of students, there is a simple but important action to be taken by government against overreach. Schools should require parents to sign a charter agreeing to support school decisions about their child as a condition of enrolment.
The Albanese government could convene a working group with representatives of state and territory governments and private school authorities to develop complaints procedures to assist schools and parents deal with disagreements. States and territories should make an approved complaints procedure a condition of registration for private schools. There could well be benefit in requesting public school authorities also to ensure that their own systems have robust complaints procedures in place.
Public investment in schooling should add real educational value to student outcomes overall rather than creating pockets of artificial excellence that owe more to selective intake than to genuine school effectiveness. It will take time and political leadership, insight and intelligence to transform our school system. The major challenge continues to be the development of funding arrangements that put the interests of students first.
Lyndsay Connors AO has held senior positions in education at both the national level and in NSW.
In 2015, she co-authored with Dr Jim McMorrow
Imperatives in Schools Funding: Equity, sustainability and achievement.