Five private schools spent as much on new facilities in one year as 3,000 Australian public schools
Five private schools spent as much on new facilities in one year as 3,000 Australian public schools
Australian Education Union report finds a $31.8bn divide in capital spending over 10 years
Infuriating. In this form, private education is an absolute cancer.
Private schools are a disgrace to the country and should be banned entirely.
Access to education should not depend on the financial lottery of your family, nor should we be funding this inequality.
I would not be particularly disappointed if they were banned entirely—with exceptions made for things like international schools—but I'd never advocate for that myself. I'd advocate for removing every single cent of their public funding. Currently, out of federal funding, private schools actually receive more money than public schools do*. That is absolutely unconscionable to me. Diverting huge amounts of resources away from public schools into private schools is the epitome of upper-class welfare, especially when we see stories like this one, or stories about how much money it's currently costing parents to send their kids to public school (in high uniform costs, excursion costs, textbooks, computers, school contributions, etc.).
* This is made up for by the fact that states provide more funding for public schools, although this varies quite substantially by state in some problematic ways.
People shouldn't be allowed to choose a better education for their children? Private schools aren't hurting anybody.
Private schools also receive the bulk of their revenue from private contributions and fees.
(Plus another $8k one-off fee to apply/enrol a child)The article is glossing over the fact that the crazy amount of money this school has is coming from parents.
$32,000 to $47,000 per year per kid pays for a lot. Assuming these fees were frozen for the next 13 years (which they obviously won't be), it'd cost a parent $525,284 per kid to send them to this school. Plus all the other costs like uniforms, books, excursions etc.
Some people can afford this.
Sounds like a good reason to tax wealthy families more, let all children’s education benefit from that wealth.
That's the other thing about these schools - the school fees themselves basically just buy you the privilege to send your kid there. But then you still get ripped thousands more for pretty much everything else. And it's not like their uniforms will be cheap. You pay extra for any sporting activity, you pay extra for electronic devices, it's just a money grab from beginning to end.
And at the end of the day, the only thing you can say with certainty is that your education was expensive. But was it worth it? Was it better than a public school?
the education is the same, legally, it's the social connections you're paying for.
Was it better than a public school?
Well, if you want to go by HSC results (and many people would consider that the yardstick) then there's many private schools among the top schools, although there's also lots of government selective schools, including the very top 4.
See: https://bettereducation.com.au/results/hsc.aspx
The highest-ranked private schools are probably academically selective in some way too, though, so I wouldn't think we can attribute the results to just the teaching there. And even if they don't, kids of wealthy parents have an academic advantage throughout their education because of factors tied to their parents' wealth (aside from being able to afford private education).
I'd imagine, though, at least some of the vast amounts of cash these schools have must go towards attractive wages for good teachers and more of them (smaller class sizes), and both of those things make a difference.
I get the point but it's not a great statistic to cite. Most schools don't expand every year so they can have spent $0 on new facilities in 2023.
So you think of those 3,000 schools none were doing expansions or renovations?
You think the budgets for those projects don’t run over years?
Or that when they do require those works that they will receive anywhere near the same level of funding?
I said “I get the point”. This means that I know about the disparity but that's just a bad way to illustrate it. You could say that when you first got a dollar from your parents, you became richer than 500 million people because at least that many are in debt right now. Or that the richest 1% bought more houses this year than 20 million Australians because most people buy 0 houses in any given year. I would find it more useful to pick a statistic that cannot be zero, such as annual budget.
I was sent to a private school for years 7-11
I hated it and I completely agree
Most people commenting here don't have kids. Private schools are so prolofic because the majority of public schools are so defunded and sad looking that there is a native demand for schools with... non-below average facilities which families are willing to pay for.
This country doesn't spend enough on education and instead is letting its citizens fund the education sector out of their own pockets. It's kinda criminal.
So instead of blanket banning private schools we should be funding public ones to the level that makes most private schools redundant.
I've worked on both private and public school projects. The budget disparity is depressing.
$30mil for a creative arts precinct including new full sized theatre that can be publically rented out vs $5mil to upgrade the entire school to meet the growing population of the area and everything had to be done on the cheap, and even then things had to be even cheaper still.
Private schools should absolutely not get any funding. Give more to public schools so that education is available to everyone regardless of status.