Abstract
School funding has always been a vexed matter in Australian political life; indeed wrangling over school funding in relation to government and private schooling was described back in 1977 as ‘Australia’s oldest, deepest, most poisonous debate’. Recently this ‘poisonous debate’ has been particularly potent. Helping to emphasise this point, in 2016 an extraordinary event happened—a national education minister of the conservative Liberal Government admitted on national television that some private schools in the nation are overfunded.
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Notes
- 1.
Some states, for example NSW, passed racial purity legislation (dismantled during the middle decades of the twentieth century) that permitted the formal exclusion of Indigenous children from public schools.
- 2.
In addition to Catholic schools and high-fee schools there was also a tiny number of alternative or progressive private schools, founded upon specific pedagogical philosophies or systems (see http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/free-to-learn---the-history-of-progressive/3319334; Cleverley 1978; Petersen 1970).
- 3.
Australia’s Liberal Party is broadly equivalent to the British Conservative Party and when in government federally, governs in coalition with the smaller National Party, former known as the Country Party.
- 4.
However, PISA 2015 results do indicate a remaining significant difference between Catholic and Independent schools, which was not seen in PISA 2009 or 2012, when all sectoral differences disappeared when socio-economic factors were taken into account (Thomson et al. 2016).
- 5.
According to the OECD (2016, p. 215), ‘the strength of the socio-economic gradient refers to how well socio-economic status predicts performance’, while its slope ‘refers to the impact of socio-economic status on performance’. In the Australian case, this would indicate that while the association between socio-economic status and performance has not increased, the differences that do result from this disparity have.
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Forsey, M., Proctor, H., Stacey, M. (2017). A Most Poisonous Debate: Legitimizing Support for Australian Private Schools. In: Koinzer, T., Nikolai, R., Waldow, F. (eds) Private Schools and School Choice in Compulsory Education. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-17104-9_4
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