Documents leaked to the ABC expose shocking rorting of taxpayer funding by the NSW Catholic school system with the approval of Catholic bishops. It is the latest in a long line of exposes about misuse of government funding by Catholic systems and which successive Coalition and Labor governments have meekly acquiesced to.
The new ABC analysis shows that NSW Catholic school authorities will have diverted more than $300 million in public funding from the system’s poorer to richer primary schools by 2023 to keep fees low in wealthy suburbs to maintain market share. The leaked documents show that schools in some of the wealthiest areas collect roughly one-third to half the fees parents at those schools are able to afford while fees in much poorer areas are set at two or three times above what those parents can afford.
Catholic education authorities have long denied the practice, but former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has exposed this as a deliberate lie. In his memoirs, he recounted a conversation with the Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, about the Government’s proposal to publish the amount of funding each school would receive under new funding arrangements. Fisher was concerned that this would reveal the Church’s cross-subsidisation of its schools in wealthy suburbs:
“…once you tell people how the government has assessed need and shown how much each school would get, we could never get away with it. People would say we were short-changing poor schools to benefit rich ones.”
People would have been right.
Fisher told Turnbull that the problem with the Government’s needs-based model was that “more funding would go to schools in the poorer outer suburbs of Sydney and country New South Wales”. So much for Catholic support for the poor! Fisher’s priority is to keep fees low for wealthy families. The wealthy should be supported at the expense of the poor according to the powerful Archbishop.
The ABC analysis shows that NSW Catholic education authorities have been diverting funding from poor to wealthy schools since 2015. But many government and other reports show it has been ongoing in NSW and other states since the Catholic system joined the Howard Government’s SES funding model in 2004.
In 2009, the National Audit Office found that systemic schools with low SES scores receive less Australian Government general recurrent grants per student from their school systems than if they were directly funded under the SES arrangements. It noted that the Department of Education didn’t even know how Catholic and other school systems distributed government funds to schools.
And nothing changed under the then Labor Government. In 2011, the Gonski report expressed concern about the lack of transparency of funding allocations in private school systems. It recommended that they should be obliged to disclose how government funding is distributed to member schools.
In 2016, a report of the Victorian Auditor-General found that the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria reallocated state government recurrent grants away from the lower socio-economic status schools to schools with a higher socio-economic status. A review of the NSW Catholic education system by Kathryn Greiner the same year found significant differences between the current funding of schools and the requirements of the Australian Education Act. It showed that schools in large city dioceses gained funding at the expense of poor schools in rural and remote areas.
Another report by the National Audit Office in 2017 found that many low SES Catholic schools were allocated significantly less funding by Catholic education authorities than their entitlement. It found that the Department of Education failed to ensure that school systems published their distribution model and did not check whether systems distributed funding according to need.
A comparison of funding of Catholic schools in affluent and poor areas of Melbourne by the Grattan Institute in 2017 found they were not funded according to need (Australian Financial Review, 21 May) It found that if Catholic schools were funded directly according to the Gonski needs-based distribution formula, “leafy green schools” would lose 42% of their funding while the poor schools receive an increase of 78%.
Similar comparisons of funding of Catholic schools in affluent and poor areas of Sydney and Melbourne by the Australian Financial Review in 2017 (14 May and 22 May) found they were not funded according to need. The analysis found that Catholic school authorities have directed millions of dollars of Commonwealth funding to wealthy schools at the expense of poor schools.
Save Our Schools has published several analyses over a decade on over-funding of wealthy Catholic and other private schools. One research paper found that almost all high SES Catholic combined and secondary schools in Australia were over-funded compared to their entitlement according to their SES score.
A decade after the first National Audit Office report nothing had changed. In 2019, a bi-partisan report of the Parliament’s Joint Committee of Public Accounts found that the Department of Education had failed to enforce its own legislation to ensure that school systems’ funding arrangements are publicly available and transparent and that systems distribute taxpayer funding to affiliated schools on a needs-basis.
Now the ABC has been sensationally leaked documents of the NSW Catholic school system showing how it continues to shift millions of taxpayer dollars intended for its schools in poor areas to schools in wealthy areas.
Catholic systems around Australia have got away with this for years despite the litany of revelations about their abuse of government funding. It is testimony to the power of the Catholic Church to obtain preferential funding agreements but ignore legislated requirements on how it distributes the funding.
There is some prospect for change. A recent report by the National School Resourcing Board also found there is insufficient transparency about how school systems distribute Commonwealth funding and that current reporting on school funding allocation and distribution is fragmented, inconsistent and incomplete. It said that their needs‑based funding arrangements should be publicly available and transparent:
“Transparency supports accountability and publicly available arrangements create an evidence base about different approaches which is valuable, especially when there is limited evidence explaining what constitutes an effective approach to respond to the variety of often competing needs of students and schools at a local level.” [p. 16]
The report recommended that the Government should identify instances where school‑level public funding distribution in a private school system varies significantly from the publicly funded share of the Schooling Resource Standard for the school. This is needed, it said, to support public confidence that the Government is monitoring the distribution of taxpayer funds to schools.
The Morrison Government has accepted the recommendations of the report. However, it remains to be seen whether there will be any effective action or change. Catholic education authorities have a long history of thumbing their nose at legislative requirements on needs-based funding and the Morrison Government does not have a good record either in challenging the Catholic Church. It quickly sued for peace when the Catholic Church ran a ruthless campaign against proposals by the Turnbull Government to make Catholic school funding arrangements more transparent.
Trevor Cobbold is National Convenor of Save Our Schools.
Comments
10 responses to “New expose of Catholic Church’s rorting of taxpayer funding”
There is no “shocking rorting of taxpayer funding by the NSW Catholic school system”. The Howard/Gonski socio-economic status funding model is unjust and so cannot be relied upon to determine how much money any school should get. There has never been any justification for a school’s funding level to be determined by how well off the students’ neighbours are, as under the first incarnation of the SES model, nor has there ever been any justification for a school’s funding level to be determined by how well off the students’ parents are, as under the second incarnation of the SES model
The Catholic school authorities wanted school fees to be incorporated into the determination of school funding levels. The Morrison government set the terms of reference for the National Schools Resourcing Board to prevent it making a recommendation along these lines. The Catholic school authorities therefore allocate the money they receive to make the funding more needs-based than it would be under the Howard/Gonski SES model. There is no reason that poor family in a well-off area should have to pay more to attend a Catholic school than a well-off family in a poor area, which is what the Howard/Gonski SES model does. The same principle applies to government schools. The NSW government does not cut the funding of Rose Bay High School because it is in a wealthy area. It funds it on the same principles as any other high school in NSW.
We can look to New Zealand for a comparison. St Joseph’s Catholic School in well-off Orekei charges $460 per year in fees (called attendance dues). St Leo’s Catholic School in well-off Devonport-Takapuna $448 per year. St Mary Mackillop Catholic School in poor Mangere-Otahuhu, charges $448. Holy Cross Catholic School in poor Otara-Papatoete charges $448. Catholic schools in New Zealand are almost fully funded by the government and charge very little. The government does not discriminate according to the income of the neighbours or the parents.
The funding of non-government schools is standard practice throughout the OECD (OECD Education at a Glance 2015, Table B3.3), even in Finland, which fully funds them but does not allow them to charge fees, but, as far as I can ascertain, no other country uses the bizzare Howard/Gonski SES model. Yet we are meant to judge the justice of any school’s funding according to what this absurd model says it should be.
How would you feel about St Joseph’s College, Riverview St Aloyisius not charging fees? The SES system is what it is until changed.
And now Chris Bonnor has joined in https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blessed-are-the-rich-catholic-schools/
Richard,
I don’t have an opinion on whether any school charges fees or not. I have an opinion on the best funding model, which is one that adjust public funding in accordance with the fees charged.
“The SES system is what it is until it is changed”. Indeed! But it needs to be changed because it increases social stratification in education and thus lowers overall educational achievement. Perhaps if we ended the obsession with who owns the school we might get somewhere.
Mr Cobbold: as per my question or Mr Mitchell – I received this, unrequested, on facebook: https://www.csnsw.catholic.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ABC-rebuttal-020920.pdf. is it true? if so, i can guess what it means about the ABC ‘research’, but can you tell me what it means about the issue of cross-subsidy? Regards
Don’t know whether to believe the ABC or the Catholic Church. Bit of a toss-up.
Mr England: that’s why I ask!
I don’t see how that chart disproves the view of either of Messrs Mitchell or Cobbold when compared with the findings of auditors general and the admission of Riverview Old Boy Archbishop Fisher to Malcolm Turnbull.
text? saying e.g. the $300m is wrong? the model is available? and the article says ‘schools in some of the wealthiest areas collect roughly one-third to half the fees parents at those schools are able to afford while fees in much poorer areas are set at two or three times above what those parents can afford.’ is that supposed to be the cross-subsidy? and if fees are above what can be afforded who would go to the school? help!
Petal B Austen,
The article does say, “schools in some of the wealthiest areas collect roughly one-third to half the fees parents at those schools are able to afford while fees in much poorer areas are set at two or three times above what those parents can afford”, but what it would say if it were accurate is “schools in some of the wealthiest areas collect roughly one-third to half the fees the Australian Education Act Section 54 says parents at those schools are able to afford while fees in much poorer areas are set at two or three times above what the same act says parents at those schools are able to afford those parents can afford”. The amount that all parents supposedly should pay is set by the median household income of all parents in the school and thus is too high for the poorest parents to afford, driving them out of the Catholic school and into the government school, thus increasing social stratification in education. Government school parents in the same areas are not expected to pay fees based on the median income of parents of the children in the government school. They rightly pay nothing no matter what their income is. Why parents’ incomes or, in the past, the students’ neighbours’ incomes, are relevant to the funding of a child in one institution but not in another has never been explained.
Chris Curtis: thank you! so ‘affordability’ is not as I normally know it, but a statutory term. it means median income of parents of children in a school. (!!! circular? and not taking into account variance of income i.e. different with richest and poorest?). applying only to non-government schools. i now see the stratification point. thanks again