Traffic impacts for private school.

In Australia today, just over 40% of secondary school children and almost 30% of primary school children attend a private school. By contrast, in the UK only 7% of children are privately educated. 

Our research shows not only do more students travel by car to private secondary schools in Australia, their car trips are almost twice as long as for government school students. As these trips are in peak hour, private schooling has a disproportionate impact on traffic congestion.

Commonwealth subsidies of private schools and their charitable status have underpinned skyrocketing enrolments. Questions over whether private schools should pay tax, why they offer questionable graduate outcomes, their tendency towards “white flight” and social polarisation, and basic fairness have long been debated. 

But what if, in weighing up the pros and cons of private schooling, and in calculating their economic costs versus benefits, we’ve all missed something rather important? Until now, no one has considered the impacts on city traffic.

We’re helping the Queensland government improve its main transport models for Brisbane and southeast Queensland. Experts use these models to assess the best policies and projects to try to save us from congestion and to provide access to the goods, jobs and services we all need in life.

What did the research find?

We are looking at how one might better model school travel. To do so we explored the latest data from the Queensland Household Travel Survey. The datasets include all the trips to school made by over 3,000 primary and secondary school children. These surveys do not report if the child went to a public or private school. But we used advanced computing methods to match the school trip destinations with a set of known public and private school locations in the South East Queensland region. This created the first set of public-versus-private school trips we know of. 

We could then look at the share of trips made by walking, cycling, public transport and car. We were also able to report the distances travelled to the different school types. 

We presented our results in Canberra at the Australasian Transport Research Forum.

At the primary school level, where fewer children attend private schools and the lower-cost Catholic school system plays a bigger role, the differences are modest. A slightly greater share of children are driven to private schools, but the average distance for those car trips is only around one kilometre more. It’s a problem, but one of similar scale to the unsustainable and unhealthy journeys made to public primary schools across Australia.

At secondary school level, where the non-Catholic independent schools have greater market share, only 1.5% more children are driven to private secondary schools (56.5% to 54.9%) and a few more drive themselves. But the car trips to those schools are almost twice as long as to the public schools.

The private secondary school children are travelling 7.8km each way, on average, to get to and from school. As this is school travel, it happens in the morning peak hour, the worst time for traffic congestion in our cities. Private secondary schooling appears to have a highly disproportionate impact.

The landscape of private schooling in southeast Queensland is problematic. Newer private schools have opened in odd locations on the edges of existing communities, or well beyond the suburban fringe. Even some of the older established GPS schools (the “elite” ones) are far from public transport. A few offer private buses, but many parents are left with little choice. They have to chauffeur their children. 

Does the extra car travel matter?

Education departments probably don’t care. But if governments are focused on reducing congestion, which their transport departments all are, and if they are looking to reduce school-related congestion effects, then private secondary schools are the worst offenders. 

We can’t just look to the transport departments to fix such problems. They’re not responsible for creating the unsustainable car-based schooling landscape they somehow must try to serve. 

It should also worry us for the individuals involved. Car-based travel is far from optimal for children’s development. 

A litany of studies show physically active travel such as walking and cycling, including to and from public transport, is better for physical and mental health, as well as for social connectedness. The links between children’s physical activity and student learning are also well established.

Given road congestion costs in Australia are expected to exceed A$30 billion a year by 2030, we suggest the congestion costs of Australia’s private school funding model should be fully calculated, costed and included when we weigh up the costs and benefits. The Commonwealth has options should it wish to tighten up in other ways. This would include not financially supporting any new private schools located far from existing communities or good public transport services.

Comment on this article

Rorting arseholes

‘Australia’s richest private schools – which charge students as much as an astonishing $70,000 a year for boarding and tuition – can access cash assistance from a new $1.2 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund’ 

Public schools get zip. Arseholes.

Awwwww I feel so sorry for them.

Fee increases at non-government schools are running at nearly twice the rate of inflation and have outpaced wage growth every year for a decade, adding to cost stresses felt by the 1.3 million families who pay for private education.......

The usual shit from the Financial Review . Feel so sorry for these people...not!

Secret Catholic school funding

Catholic schools in NSW receive $300 million in taxpayer funding every six months but face far less scrutiny from the state government over outcomes and performance than public schools, prompting calls for greater transparency.

While NSW Treasury officials pored over NSW Department of Education (DOE) budgets this year, the NSW government's only budgetary oversight of the Catholic sector's annual funding was a one-page document stating how much money it would be paid.

Former NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli said the document, obtained by Greens MP David Shoebridge under freedom of information, showed that schools receiving large amounts of public money were not subject to enough scrutiny.

"They get more public money than quite a few government agencies," Mr Piccoli said. "I'm not suggesting they are doing anything wrong. But the public has a right to know what's happening inside the schools that are getting that money."

Catholic Schools NSW said the document was a payment notice, not an accountability document, and did not reflect its reporting requirements to the state government, which were set out elsewhere, such as the education act and regulations set out by the NSW Education Standards Authority.

Private school marketing....now there’s s surprise.

The blonde girls are in focus, studious kids are Asian and only white boys get a kick, a study of the images used in promotional material for Victorian schools has found.

Deakin University's Trevor McCandless analysed the marketing materials in government, Catholic and independent schools for his PhD thesis to see how these represented "the schools' best guess at what parents find attractive for their children".

The darker a student's skin, the less likely they are to be the centre of attention in the image or even in focus," he said.

While schools rarely mentioned ethnicity in written text, Dr McCandless' PhD thesis found they uniformly picked images in their prospectuses and videos that suggested unconscious stereotypes, resulting in a "colour-coded hierarchy [that] is repeated to the point of tedium".

Israeli legal system helps out child abuser.....again!

An Israeli court has granted bail to Malka Leifer, a former Melbourne private school headteacher wanted on 74 charges of child sexual abuse in Australia.

In a twist in the judicial saga that has dragged on for five years, Leifer is due to again be placed under house arrest. She was re-arrested just last year after police accused her of feigning mental illness.

Judges ruled the prosecution had until Friday to appeal the decision, which would have Leifer live at her sister’s house near Tel Aviv.

Manny Waks, founder of Kol V’Oz, an Israel-based organisation against child sex abuse in the global Jewish community, said the decision was “an absolute travesty and continues to bring shame on the State of Israel”.

From the Guardian

Could ( I know they won't) Labor de-fund private schools? I know the answer.

The UK’s Labour Party recently voted in a policy to effectively abolish private schools and integrate them into the state system.

This is a courageous move designed to redress social inequity – many of those working in the top levels of the UK government were educated in private schools. Two of Britain’s three most recent prime ministers went to the prestigious Eton College, which charges annual fees of more than £40,000.

The UK opposition party’s plan will likely warm the hearts of similarly minded Australians. Many of the same arguments about educational inequality have been floated in Australia. Many individuals and organisations have also, for years, been calling for the government to stop funding non-government schools.

But implementing a policy in Australia like that proposed in the UK would prove very difficult. For one thing, it’s a matter of numbers. Only 5% of the United Kingdom’s students go to a private school. The challenges are magnified in Australia where nearly 15% of students are enrolled in independent schools and nearly 20% in Catholic parish schools. 

But beyond that, Australia’s complex set of school governance structures would make such a move very unlikely to succeed.

Eight education systems

Under UK Labour’s proposal, if it took office, private schools would lose their charitable status and any other public subsidies or tax breaks. Their endowments, investments and properties would be “redistributed democratically and fairly across the country’s educational institutions”.

For Australia to do the same, at the outset, it would be a constitutional issue. The Australian Constitution empowers states and territories to provide school education, thus creating eight different education systems. For Australia to abolish private schools like that proposed in the UK, a choice from three possible processes would need to occur to get around this issue. 

First, Australia could change the Constitution. Second, all states and territories could voluntarily cede their powers for schooling back to the Commonwealth. Or third, each state and territory government could agree to enact the policy in its own jurisdiction. 

Only eight of the proposed 44 changes to the Australian Constitutionhave been agreed to since Federation. And given the political territorialism that exists between states and territories, it is hard to imagine any of these solutions being implemented.

Assuming one of the above could be enacted, taking over existing non-government schools would be further complicated by the diverse nature of school governance structures. Australia’s different school governance structures would make it almost impossible to cede all private education to the Commonwealth. from shutterstock.com

In addition to being registered with their relevant state or territory government authority, more than 1,000 non-government primary and secondary schools are registered with the Australian Not-for-profit Charities Commission. 

This means there are no “owners” who financially gain from operating the school. Financial surpluses are not distributed to shareholders but must be reinvested in the school.

For a government to take over a not-for-profit charity in such a way would cause extreme anxiety to the thousands of community organisations which also exist under this legal structure. 

Another group of non-government schools are governed by church authorities. A school such as William Clarke College in Sydney’s north-west, for instance, is governed by an ordinance of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney whose own authority is derived from state legislation. A smaller number of schools, such as Newington College in NSW or the eight Queensland Grammar Schools, are governed directly through acts of parliament. 

To absorb these schools into one government system would require a change to a range of legislation covering charitable and religious organisations. Given various state and territory governments can’t even agree on the age students should start school, achieving consistency in the legislative realm seems remote. 

We should keep working to reduce inequality

Advocates of private schooling in the UK have hit back at Labour’s proposal, indicating lengthy, and costly, legal challenges. These could range from parents’ rights to make choices for their childrens’ development (enshrined in Article 18 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) through to property and charitable trust laws. 

Resistance to the proposed policy change from the UK Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (that describes itself as an association of heads of “some of the world’s leading independent schools”) is already fierce and suggests the same would likely be the case in Australia. 

One consequence of inaction is growing inequity. Successful education systems prioritise equity and quality. Analysis of social disadvantage by the OECD found more than 52% of Australian disadvantaged students are enrolled in disadvantaged schools. This is compared to the OECD average of 48% and 45% in the UK (world leaders are Nordic countries at an average of 43%). 

Australian analysis also highlights a growing concentration of advantaged students are already in educationally advantaged schools. 

Creating a socially and politically just education system is a worthy objective. But it’s not just a public-private issue. 

Segmented schooling also exists in some Australian government schooling jurisdictions. For example, NSW has a highly stratified government education system which includes single-sex schools and various selective schools (academic, performing arts, sports and technology schools). 

This creates enrolment interest from families living outside local communities, exacerbating infrastructure pressures in government schools. And some of NSW’s selective schools have concentrations of students who are far wealthier than in some private schools. 

The debate over what our society wants from schooling is about equitable opportunities for everyone. The policy outlined by the UK’s Labour Party raises fundamental questions about the role and process of education in society. There seems value to ask the same for Australia.

The fact is Australia has one of the most socially segregated education systems in the world, & despite knowing exactly which schools need additional resources, the Federal Government has entrenched a schools funding regime that shifts billions to advantaged children.

From the Independent