Trevor Cobbold is well known in education circles for selectively presenting funding data to lead readers to a pre-conceived conclusion.
He was at it again in Pearls & Irritations on 14 March, saying that public funding for non-government schools has risen faster than it has for government schools.
His “adjusted” figures claim that between 2009 and 2023, public funding for Catholic schools rose by $3101 per student, for Independent schools by $2708, and for government schools, by just $2091.
He compounds this trickery by using percentages to suggest that Catholic school funding increased by 34.8% – double the 17.5% increase for public schools! Independent school funding rose 21.2%, he says.
However, the data below — from the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority — shows that the public funding gap has actually widened in favour of government schools since the introduction of the current student funding model in 2014 (ie, following the Gonski Review):
So why are Mr Cobbold’s figures different?
Mr Cobbold uses a neat little trick in which he takes per-student funding data and “adjusts” it for inflation.
He does this to strip out the main driver of funding growth for government schools, which is indexation.
This is disingenuous because indexation has a greater impact on government schools than on non-government schools. Here’s why.
All schools in all sectors are funded according to the Schooling Resource Standard, a funding model that allocates every school a “base amount” — currently $13,977 per primary student and $17,565 per secondary student — for every student it enrols, plus additional funding called ‘loadings’ for up to six types of disadvantage.
For all government schools, the base amounts are paid by state and federal governments, regardless of parent income.
It’s a different story for non-government schools, where parents are expected to contribute to the base amounts according to their “capacity” (ie, their household income).
Governments therefore reduce the base amounts they pay to each non-government school by between 10% and 80%, depending on the median income of the parents whose children attend the school.
This reduction does not apply to government schools; they will always receive the maximum base funding possible, leaving little scope for funding growth except through annual indexation.
Non-government schools do have scope for their per student public funding to grow – if they enrol more students from lower income families than they did the year before.
And that is precisely what has been happening in Independent schools for decades.
As this graph shows, the fastest annual growth in enrolment in NSW Independent schools has been among schools charging less than $5000 per year – usually Christian, Islamic, Anglican, Adventist and secular schools serving low to middle income families (it’s a similar story nationally).
None of this is explained or conceded by Mr Cobbold. He prefers to leave readers with the impression that governments give increasing levels of public funding to non-government schools for no apparent reason.
Another key funding driver — for all school sectors — is disadvantage. Governments pay disadvantage funding in full to both government and non-government schools.
As former Department of Education secretary Michele Bruniges told the SMH Schools Summit recently, all sectors — Catholic, Independent and government — show increasing numbers of schools with at least half of their students in the lowest quartile of advantage.
Public funding increases annually if a school enrols additional students with any of the four student-based disadvantages (disability, low English proficiency, socio-educational advantage and/or Indigenous background).
The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics Schools dataset shows that the vast majority of additional students have been enrolled in non-government schools over the past five years.
Enrolments in Independent schools nationally have risen by more than 108,000 since 2019 while Catholic school enrolments increased by more than 50,000.
Over the same period, government schools rose by less than 25,000.
Again, none of this is explained by Mr Cobbold.
He states, correctly, that the majority of disadvantaged students are in government schools, but fails to acknowledge that each of these students already attracts additional funding by way of disadvantage loadings to the government school sector.
We can argue over whether the disadvantage loading amounts are adequate, but rest assured – if and when they rise, they rise equally for all schools in all sectors.
One more thing.
State and territory governments are the primary funders of government schools and most have failed to meet their share of SRS funding. This has led to a shortfall in SRS funding for government schools of 5%-10%, depending on jurisdiction.
Most state and territory governments have been lifting their share in recent years, albeit slowly.
The Independent school sector fully supports recent agreements with the Commonwealth to fund government schools at 100% of their SRS.
If you want to know about the government’s student funding model, our website explains it in simple terms (somebody had to do it).
Margery Evans
Margery Evans is chief executive of the Association of Independent Schools of NSW, which represents the state’s 430 autonomously owned and operated schools and their 245,452 students.