Or maybe it’s doing a little research on the genuine benefit of tithing a useful portion of our weekly income at a faith-based school, the faith of which many parents don’t even practice or really share.
Victoria’s parents are so guilt-ridden that she markets to them about how they are hurting their child by not paying to send them to school by advertising their privilege on Eastlink. What if they discover the truth about the supposed educational gains made by paying all that money and don’t find much of a return?
What if they find that, by multiple measures, our government schools clearly outperform their fee-charging counterparts?
I feel for our private and independent school leaders. They have found themselves on a very competitive playing field and are forced to spend increasing amounts of parent and taxpayer-provided funds each year on marketing and facilities, not education.
That’s not why they got into teaching, but the pain doesn’t end there either.
The second problem facing private schools could come from our new federal government.
Credit: Matt Golding
Despite including education policy in its own “small goal” approach to the election campaign, the Albanian government will not be able to hide its commitments to fair and needs-based funding for long.
The current funding deal, which Labor has chosen not to challenge, ends next year. Education unions, teachers and families invested in public schools will be watching closely.
They will look to statistically bloated and overfunded private schools, such as the obscenely rich Essendon Grammar ($23 million overfunded), Haileybury ($22 million) and Ivanhoe Grammar ($10 million), to return. in the package
loading
Of course, as is the case when petrol prices bite, Porsche drivers aren’t the ones to be hit the hardest. And I expect very few of the aforementioned schools to experience an enrollment crisis.
It will be schools you’ve probably never heard of whose parents work two jobs to support this low-paying living option that we can predict will leave the lower-fee private options.
These potential new public school additions, along with existing public education participants, will be looking to fund their own schools, at least according to the school resource standard that the former Morrison government set and then decided to forget for a decade.
And if Jason Clare does indeed choose meaningful education reform as the hallmark of his time in that portfolio, the pain of less money to spend on private schools on billboards, orchestra pits and Olympic-sized swimming pools is coming.
loading
Transparency reform, where funds will be allocated to schools based on need and potential for improvement, rather than on brilliant alumni of government ministers or their proximity to a marginal electorate, is a major threat to the private school sector.
I hope that those who have a greater interest in this fight will not do so quietly. But I also suspect that we haven’t heard the last of Colmont School’s sad story yet.
The Opinion Newsletter is a weekly collection of viewpoints that will challenge, defend and inform your own. Register here.