Misleading Figures
Herald Sun Friday, June 20, 2003
Education reporters or their editors, regardless which paper we're reading, seem hell-bent on confusing the public about school funding. Your page 2 article "Schools for rich score government cash" baldly says "Wesley will get $7.8m... the most of any school."
But a state-run school of Wesley's size gets over $20m from the taxpayer! So your figures at best merely reflect the non-sensational fact that Wesley is the biggest of the private schools.
The real figures that relate to the envy question are that each Wesley student gets only about one-third of the normal funding of a school place, and that even the poorest student in Australia can only get 70% funding if they attend a non-state school.
Students from the highest income families get only 13.5% funding. The fact that Wesley students' overall funding level is not that low merely reveals that many Wesley families are not as well-heeled as the envy-mongers would like us to believe.
Philip O'Carroll