‘Segregation’ of Australian school system grows as exodus to private schools continues
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-05/abs-school-enrolment-data-private-vs-public-cost-of-living/106414016?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link
23 Comments
Remove all government funding from private schools.
Often private schools are cheaper than what you’re already used to spending on childcare.
We are a 90% maximum subsidy family, and the cost of childcare per year only 5% cheaper than the private school next door, and there’s cheaper privates within 10 minutes away.
So working families who are already used to the cost of overpriced daycare, the cost of private schooling doesn’t seem so bad.
State selectives are still very popular
We should commission a parliamentary report into education outcomes in Australia, then promptly ignore the recommended reforms. Then do it again.
I genuinely don’t blame them, as an ex teacher I just gave up, there was no fixing the system, it’s rotten and seems to turn your children into dollars for executive and not much else. I am genuinely opposed to private schooling, but there’s no harm in admitting that the public system is just a shuffling husk that died a long time ago.
Should we ask why?
“My boys are teenage almost. So, this age is where the kids will naturally not listen to the parents but they will trust blindly to the friends group, so this is very important where our children are going and what sort of friends they have,” Ms Poudel said.
This is a disgusting attitude.
I’ve worked in both private and public education now and I will never work in private education again.
It is absolutely not fair that students miss out on quality education due to their socio-economic status. I grew up poor, I feel like it’s my duty to give back to public education.
I’ve had lower class number averages in my public schools too. At my private schools in QLD they shoved 30 kids into **every** class (27 in Prep!). If a student left halfway through the term, there was immediately another kid added within the fortnight.
The staff burnout at both of my CathEd schools was wild too. Extreme expectations from parents, admin, CathEd policy, and student attitude. One kid told me that his parents “pay my salary” and he’d get his dad to “sue me” for literally following school policy. That attitude was so ingrained. Sexist and racist comments every day with no admin backing. 🥱
At least in public education, when the kids are being a bit too much, I have a lot more empathy for their collective background.
The interesting thing is here in Melbourne (I’m sure it’s similar in the other capitals), is that many of the private schools (talking the lower fee ones mainly) are more financially accessible than highly sought after public schools where you need about 2.5mill to live in the zone.
This is by design.
Oh cool, yet another disaster built by decades of neglect that our current government is doing nothing to fix.
I went to a public high school in the 2000s.
* The drama/arts wing was completely out of commission for TWO YEARS due to a sewerage leak.
* Some classes were in demountables that were so incredibly hot that sweat would drip down onto our books and blur our writing. Kids would get heat sick. To manage this, students had free license to leave class for 5 – 10 minutes to recover enough to come back in. There was a constant stream of us kids coming in and out.
* One of my classes was smaller (8 or 9 students), and the teacher showed up literally twice the entire year – gave us all A’s so we wouldn’t complain, which we thought was the sweetest deal ever.
I remember being stunned when I met a private school kid that casually mentioned their air conditioning, school pool, and their fully equipped science labs. All the more stunned when I learned about the disparity in school funding as an adult. We are robbing kids from poorer families of any tiny chance they might have.
The only difference is private school kids can afford nicer drugs
I live down the road from my local public high school and my colleagues wife teachers there. She’s on a visa so is locked in for a couple of years. The stories she tells about the feral kids who disrupt the whole class and can’t be removed, combined with the amount of times I see cop cars at the school. Has decided it for me that I’ll find the $7k per kid to send mine to one of the local private schools. Not that they’re anything outstanding academically, I just see it as a safety/quality of life fee to pay
What a surprise. I have had dealings with the Australian Public School System over the past 20 years. In a variety of roles, from parent to member of staff.
Let me be as clear as I can be:
If you have preschool or school-aged children in Australia, do everything in your power to keep them away from the public system.
It is fundamentally broken. It will take GENERATIONS of children before it changes.
There are good people in that system, but they are doomed to fail because the system does not care for children or their staff.
Public schools are not places of education; they are holding pens.
This is the reality. It’s not fair, it’s wrong, it’s fucked, but it’s the truth.
It’s because most public schools are shit.
And the Department of Education (NSW) is actively trying to make it worse. They are caving to increasingly dumb parents that want to empower the students. It’s the school equivalent of gentle parenting.
“Let’s get rid of uniforms because they oppress student identity”, “let’s stop giving detentions because they’re traumatic”, “let’s stop doing tests because they cause anxiety”, and “let’s fix the teaching shortage by allowing low ATAR school leavers to become teachers”. And let’s not get started on EdTech.
These initiatives:
– add administrative load to teachers, so you lose good teachers, while bringing in poor quality teachers
– reduce consequences for students, so they are emboldened and create a poor learning environment (and more teachers leave)
– reduce academic rigour and school image
So what do parents do? The ones with money and brains pump their kids for tutoring to get them into selective. The ones just with money send them to private or possibly a public school in a high SES area. The rest of the population (clueless) keeps sending their spawn to the local school/daycare/prison.
It’s worth noting that we are in an era of declining cognitive ability in high school leavers, so the above isn’t just subjective. We are in the first era in modern memory where our kids are coming out dumber than us. GenX gentle parenting fucked with the system too hard and Millennials cemented this anti pattern. Ref: US senate testimony by Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath.
I work with teens, I have some who deal with extreme school refusal due to ongoing bullying and harassment at their current school, to the point they feel unsafe attending and even with support letters from multiple disciplines they are not getting accepted into other public schools as they “aren’t in the zone” meaning I’ve seen multiple kids who can’t afford private educate drop out of school at 14 and then CPS gets involved due to no schooling but still nothing is done and after a while the report is simply closed and the kid is left to pick up the pieces and do TAFE as an adult or just enter the workforce. That or parents scrape everything together for the cheapest private school they can find, which is often harder for them to get to and from than one of the other 5 public schools they’ve been rejected from.
We have data on this, private education doesn’t result in better education outcomes.
Most private schools are also openly at-odds with the values of most Australians.
And private schools make SFA accommodations for special needs students.
Yet now multiple generations of f*ckwits send their kids to private schools according to this naive idea that their kids will make “connections”. You send your kid to a private school, thinking their friend’s dad will give them a job upon graduating… and your kid’s friend’s dad is expecting you to do the same.
Flawless logic.
Exodus to homeschool is also at a huge rate nearly doubling every year now
95% of the private schools in my city are religious. The ones that aren’t are 25K per year, so not an option for my middle class atheist ass. I’ll have to buy a house in a decent catchment… though the mortgage is making me wonder if 250K on private secular education would be cheaper in the end.
The government started this (NSW perspective) with selective public schools. You either get into a selective school or you go to the local public school that has been stripped of its best students.
Sending kids to private schools is a necessary option for a lot of people, that’s a direct result of selective public schools.
I think part of it also just Australian society as whole not valuing academic excellence and academic discipline. If your society looks down on people who study hard you end up with a rabble
Does this lump comprehensive Catholic schools in with the private schools? It’s not clear.
Reason being, most of the really expensive private schools are struggling with enrollments. People don’t see the value anymore because they’re full of the kids of OF creators, social media celebs, entertainers, dodgy developers and criminals. Only gullible parent fall for their sneaky marketing techniques, selling the idea of ‘networking.’
Comprehensive Catholic schools however, are overflowing. With some parents baptising their kids just to get in. Most of it isn’t about the education or teaching standards exactly. It’s about the curriculum. The public school curriculum is wild – social engineering at its finest! And parents are responding by withdrawing their kids. Parents would rather have their kids learn about Jesus than that.