It's drawn little comment, but the decades-long drift of
students from government to non-government schools has ended.
Figures released by the Bureau of Statistics last month
show that 65 per cent of our 3.8 million students went to public schools in
2016, the same proportion as in 2013. If anything, the public-school share is
creeping up.
The non-government share divides between Catholic
systemic schools with 20 per cent and independent schools with less than 15 per
cent. I'll refer to both as private schools.
But the public schools' 65 per cent today is down from 79
per cent in 1977.
When Ipsos Public Affairs asked people why they thought
other people sent their kids to private schools, the most commonly cited
reasons included the higher standard of education (50 per cent), the better
discipline (49 per cent), the better facilities (46 per cent), the size of
classes (43 per cent) and because it's a status symbol (40 per cent).
But I have my own theory on why so many people have opted
for private schooling. I think a lot of it gets down to parental guilt.
These days families have much fewer children, which means
parents take a lot more active interest in their kids' schooling than they did
when I was the last of four.
And these days both parents are more likely be in paid
work – meaning they have more money to spend, but see less of their kids than
their parents did.
So what more natural than for parents to believe that, in
their decisions about how to spend their income, ensuring their kids get the
best education possible should have high priority.
And what's more natural in our market economy than to
assume that the more you have to pay for something, the higher quality it's
likely to be.
It's the old male cop-out, spread to women: I may not see
as much of my kids as I'd like to, but I'm working night and day so I can
afford to give them the best of everything.
The more materialist you are, the more you're inclined to
judge a school by the quality of its facilities – gyms and swimming pools,
music, art and drama theatres – than by the quality of its teachers.
Of course, the former is, as economists say, much more
"observable" than the latter.
But whatever people give as their reasons for preferring
private schools, you'll never convince me they're not well aware of the status
they gain by sending their kids to private schools, especially independent
schools.
Private schools are among the things economists classify
as "positional goods" – they reveal your position in the pecking
order.
But what's changed? Why has the drift to private schools
come to an end?
One possibility is that the slow wage growth of recent
years has made it harder for parents to afford private school fees.
This may be particularly the case for independent
schools, where the rate of increase in fees from year to year bears little relationship
to rate at which teachers' salaries are rising.
Nor does the rate at which government grants have been
growing seem to have had much effect in slowing the rate at which independent
school fees have grown. (The extra government grants may have gone into
improving schools' facilities.)
My guess is that, as economic textbooks predict,
independent school fees rise according to what the market will bear. They judge
how strongly demand for their product is growing relative to supply by the
length of their waiting lists.
In any case, keeping the cost of independent schooling
high is an essential element in maintaining its status as a positional good.
Another possible contributor to the end of the drift to
private schools is the decision of state governments – particularly NSW
governments – to increase the number of places at selective schools. Why pay
fees when you can get what you want inside the government system?
As a parent who's had one of each – independent and
selective – I can assure you selective schooling works well as an
(intellectual) positional good.
But there's one last possible contributor to the end of
the trend to private schools: maybe parents are realising that paying all those
fees doesn't buy your kid superior academic results along with their old school
tie.
Julia Gillard's My School website has done little to
encourage greater competition between schools (a silly idea she got from
economists), but it has provided a fabulous database for education researchers.
Various researchers have used it to demonstrate that the
best predictor of children's academic results is the socio-economic status
(including level of educational attainment) of their parents.
And when you take account of parents' socio-economic
status, there's little evidence that kids of similar backgrounds do any better
academically at one kind of school than another.
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