Stand and Deliver! Publicly Funded Private Schools to Share Facilities

Public Schools around the country should immediately begin to make contact with their local private schools and begin to make an assessment of the private school facilities that must be made available to public school students.

Ten years of the Howard Coalition Government and its outrageously private school biased funding formula has clearly generated an embarrassment of riches for private schools. Well, at least it seems the newly elected Rudd Labor Government and Minister Julia Gillard are embarrassed and are attempting redress the gluttonous private schools’ plunder.

Announced on Sunday 20 January, the Federal Government's $62.5 million Local Schools Working Together Program aims to encourage the creation of first-class shared facilities between government and non-government schools.

Undoubtedly the first class facilities already exist in private schools and the funds allocated by the Federal Government could be well spent in the transport of public school students to access the private school facilities.

The powerful private school lobby group South Australian Association of Independent Schools Executive Director Gary LeDuff stated in the Sunday Mail that "In principle I support the idea, but we would need to work through the complexities of the source of funds. In the independent schools sector, on average 85 per cent of funds for capital works comes from the parents. No state government funding is available for capital works.”

“How do you then share that sort of facility when the rest of the community may not be contributing a fair amount of the costs?"

While LeDuff omits that the funding formula established by the former Federal Government and maintained by the Rudd Government has been siphoning more public funding into private schools than they know what to do with, he goes onto hint at a backlash from private schools required to engage in the programme.

As for fairness, “the rest of the community” – the two thirds of Australian families who send their children to public schools have already contributed a “fair amount of the cost” through taxes paid to federal and state governments. The “rest of the community” have also paid the cost because students in public schools have gone without while private school facilities have flourished. Hard to put a dollar value on that!

This Rudd Labor Government initiative is useful in the short term to begin to address the inequities of funding but the Government is fully aware of the growing tide of public antagonism toward a funding formula that is exacerbating a growing cultural and educational divide between the haves and have nots.

The Rudd Government should immediately invest a small fraction of the budget surplus - a sum of $2.9 billion annually – into public schools across the nation to ensure all schools meet the MCEETYA determined National Resource Standard. Then it should develop an equitable and fair mechanism for the allocation of funds to public and private schools.

Now that would be a fiscally responsible, interest rate neutral, nation building education revolution.

In the meanwhile call your local private school and carry out your own audit. Oh and tell the kids to pack their bathers!