The School Funding System
Saturday, January 01, 2000
{Written before the new Kemp funding scheme}
Children’s schooling should be funded according to their family’s means, not according to the identity of the proprietor of their school (as we do now). We force certain children into certain schools. We distribute the old age pension according to personal means – but we don’t tell them where to spend it.
The dream of equal opportunity through schooling can never be realised. Some children are born more intelligent. Some families are richer. Some families believe more passionately in education. Some parents make greater sacrifices to get their kids into better schools.
Nevertheless, we Australians expect our Government to do what is within its power to provide equal opportunity to the nation’s children – and that is to distribute school funding fairly. There are two concepts of fairness – give everybody the same or give the poorer more. Our Government does neither.
Most families with incomes over $78,000 use our state-run schools, free of charge, fully funded by the taxpayer. Of course, most children go to these schools. All are fully funded, regardless of personal wealth. Another 20% of children use Catholic schools, which are 70% funded by the taxpayer – again regardless of personal wealth.
The third sector, about 10%, go to private or independent schools, receiving on average 30% funding. The shortfall is collected as fees from parents – again regardless of income. A battler, choosing such a school for their child, working overtime, going without, or sadly having to leave, does not receive even the state-school level of funding, but only the same low level as everybody else at the independent school.
Independent schools have to impress their client families favourably in order to survive. Many state-run schools have a largely captive market. They are freer to support huge bureaucracies, self-serving unions, dubious teaching philosophies, and to wallow in ideology which is far to the left of the families they serve. Inevitably, the independent sector will usually produce a better outcome for a given child.
Obviously, the way to equalise educational opportunity in this country is to fund all children, regardless of which school they attend, according to the means of their families. This will open new doors of opportunity. It will give lower-income parents real choice. Schools will compete on an open market.
A school which caters for more poor families should get more government funding. This need not entail significantly more taxpayer’s money, just a fairer redistribution – and it would, incidentally, raise the standard of education in this country.
To avoid financing shocks, no school need lose dollar numbers per head during the changeover period until inflation caught up. This would also give good state schools time to shake off their ideological masters and concentrate on education.
The present funding system is nothing short of a scam, and the lower-income public will soon wake up to how their children are being held down.
P.S. Philip O’Carroll founded Fitzroy Community School in 1976 with Faye Berryman, (now husband and wife). Their school has fulfilled all their hopes for what they call “an empowering curriculum” – except in one frustrating respect. This school spends no more than a state-run school, but lower-income families attracted to the school have to be turned away because they can’t pay the fees that are made necessary by the present school funding system.
Philip O'Carroll