In the examples listed by ChrisC and adumbrated by others, every one of those publicly-subsidised private (mainly health-care) businesses are publicly subsidised to ensure universal public access to the service, to ensure that anybody in the community can go to them and get similar service. "bulk-billing" private schools would be comparable, but clearly unlikely. Some private providers are religiously inhibited from providing all services approved by the public, and in my mind should not be subsidised unless this disability can be overcome.

In contrast, public funding that goes to private schools sequesters those funds and prevents their access by the public. A child cannot just enroll at a private school (in their catchment) as of right, the private school "system" makes no collective promise to ensure access to education to all, and is conspicuous in it's desire to not accept "public" rules that relate to discrimination. Capital invested by the state in private schools becomes private (though often not taxed if associated with a "religion"), running costs invested in private schools become subject to rules not influenced by the public.

Since attendance has been rising, it seems clear that private schools have a product to offer, and have had their industry sufficiently incubated (I would say coddled) to establish market share. If people wish to eschew the public, no worries, but the public money should remain public, to maintain a system that must still accept those rejected, or expelled, or borderline. If public subsidy is helping some people send "their" kids to private schools, then these people are being unrealistic. The best investment for their grandchildren and beyond is public.

I approve of public funding of private schools only to the extent that schools accepting such funding accept public burdens. Most do not, and will not.

Rusty

Rusty Catheter,

In my examples “those publicly-subsidised private (mainly health-care) businesses are” not “publicly subsidised to ensure universal public access to the service, to ensure that anybody in the community can go to them and get similar service”. Doctors can charge whatever they like and therefore not everyone can afford to go to any doctor at all. Childcare centres can charge whatever they like and therefore not everyone can afford to go to any childcare centre at all. Only pharmacists are prevented from charging extra.

The people who use private schools are members of the public, just as the people who use private pharmacists, private doctors (even expensive ones) and private childcare centres (even expensive ones) are.

Political reality means that sufficient people use private schools to ensure that they will get some of their taxes back to assist them. The public education lobby will either wake up to that fact or continue to see the proportion of children in government schools decline.

The Gonski report’s recommendation of loadings for disadvantage was meant to encourage private schools to take on more difficult children, but, instead of recommending the loadings be paid in full according to the needs of the child, it decided they should be reduced if the students at the school had wealthy neighbours.

Chris Bonnor,

I read your submission to the Gonski review. It was a very good one, but, like every other submission from the public education lobby, it did not propose an actual funding model. In fact, none of the hundreds of submissions I read got around to proposing a funding model. The only submission that did was mine. Consequently, the Gonski panel said that it used the costs of so-called performing reference schools to determine a spending level – in fact, it used all schools – and endorsed the Howard government’s socio-economic status funding model, which the Labor government legislated to slowly force onto all schools currently protected from it. This Howard/Gonski model increases the educationally debilitating social stratification that you dealt with in your submission and that the public education lobby claims to oppose.

The debate is not over, but the public education lobby is deluded if it thinks it can end the funding of private schools. It has a choice, a choice it should have made when the Gonski review was established: it can keep banging on about who owns the schools and see the schools it claims to defend fall further behind or it can reframe the debate as public education being about access by the public to education irrespective of who owns the school.

The public education lobby needs a Paul Keating – without the nastiness – to shake up the whole discussion. It should present a united front with the low-fee private schools and the teacher unions, both the AEU and the IEU, which were themselves reckless in not advocating a specific funding formula based on an explicit staffing formula based on a long-term settlement of decent teaching conditions in all schools in Australia. My submission to the Senate inquiry into school funding gives more reasoning and the details of the formula.

Chris Curtis

I have read the latest paper from Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd. I may at last be getting through to the public education lobby that it has to move out of the 1950s and support a funding model that is truly needs-based. Their paper proposes that non-government schools be funded on the basis of their actual income, not the SES of the students’ neighbours, as long as they meet certain public requirements:
“The second option is to require non-government schools, as a condition of their public funding, to accept a wider range of obligations which reflect the extent of this funding. In its submission to the Gonski review the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council raised the idea of a charter for use of public funding. The purpose of such a charter would be to express the public purpose of government in providing public funding for education in operational terms….
“… the imposition and level of fees will have the effect of reducing the school's entitlement to public funding….
“While non-government schools in receipt of public funding may declare and provide education within a particular faith or ethos for their client community, they should not unreasonably restrict the access to the school of any child ….”
(https://www.nswtf.org.au/files/2015_07july_17_private_school_public_cost.5.pdf). This is the sort of system that operates in other developed countries and is the only way that the public education lobby can stop losing the debate against private schools funding.

I have previously mentioned how The Drum will not publish posts from me on education. It has an article today on taxation (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-20/cooney-the-rights-gst-brain-explosion/6633344) that has diverted to educational funding. I have made three posts in response to others. None have been published. Here is the first:

‘People have no trouble understanding that public purposes can be achieved by non-government entities. Thus, the staunchest members of the public education lobby are happy with private doctors, publicly funded by Medicare, private pharmacists, publicly funded by the PBS, and private childcare centres, publicly funded by childcare rebates. It is only the public funding of private schools that brings out the hostility.

‘At least 21 OECD countries, including even the much-praised Finland, fund private schools, several of them more generously than Australia (Education at a Glance 2014, p 249). Norway spends $US13,630 from government funds (by purchasing price parity) per student in a private school. Sweden spends $US10,0028. Belgium spends $US9576. Finland spends $US9281. 30 per cent of fully funded schools in England are private. They are called voluntary aided or voluntary controlled schools.

‘In the 50 years the public education lobby has spent some arguing against public funding of non-government schools, the proportion of students attending them has increased by half. It’s time that lobby reframed the debate as being not about who owns the school but who has access to it.’

Here is the second:

‘RegH,

‘It must have been a very long time since you checked because at least 21 OECD countries fund private schools, several of them more generously than Australia (Education at a Glance 2014, p 249). Norway spends $US13,630 from government funds (by purchasing price parity) per student in a private school. Sweden spends $US10,0028. Belgium spends $US9576. Finland spends $US9281. 30 per cent of fully funded schools in England are private. They are called voluntary aided or voluntary controlled schools.

‘“In Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, the Slovak Republic and the partner economy Hong Kong-China, principals in privately managed schools reported that over 90% of school funding comes from the government, while in Slovenia, Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Luxembourg and Ireland, between 80% and 90% of funding for privately managed school does.”
(Public and Private Schools How management and funding relate to their Socio-economic Profile, OECD)’

IN RESPONSE TO:

‘RegH:
20 Jul 2015 11:12:18pm
Private schools are just that, privately owned and operated. The last time I checked, no other country subsidises private schools.’

No wonder people believe things that simply aren’t true!