Amid the furore surrounding Education Minister Birmingham's disclosure of figures showing massive discrepancies in public funding between some independent schools and low-SES schools, some facts need scrutinising.
Catholic Education Commissions, seeking to safeguard an equitable share of Commonwealth funds, maintain what must be to some an uneasy alliance in times of austerity between Catholic systemic schools and Catholic independent schools.
In general terms, systemic schools draw for their enrolment from lower-SES postcodes than Catholic independent schools. And postcodes being an indelible predictor of the educational and other life chances of Australians, balancing systemic school funding claims against those of independent schools is both politically and ethically problematic.
Of course, the solution to such economic discrepancies has traditionally been to reapportion funds at Commission level so as to ensure that those with the greatest need get the highest funding.
However, Australian school funding attitudes are rarely flexible and ameliorative at the best of times. This leads to a complex policy discourse, inevitably reduced to ideological posturing, becoming hijacked by partisan interests. What better reason for a new start!
It often escapes our attention that Catholic schools in nearly all of the other OECD polities are fully-funded. As such, they are part and parcel of a fully publicly-funded state-based school provision.
Of course, in every one of those other polities (with the exception of the US, where religious schools are unfunded and, tellingly, in decline) the Church enjoys certain rights in relation to maintaining the religious autonomy of its schools.
But in all other respects, members of the public wishing to avail of the services of Catholic schools in those countries are welcomed to enrol in them.
"Since the mid-70s, what was once a virtually Catholic funding dispensation resulted in a burgeoning Australian private school sector, a phenomenon considerably out of kilter with contemporary constructions of Catholic schools as bastions of social justice."
Indeed, the Catholic Education Service of England and Wales, which is the peak body responsible for framing policies that guide Catholic schools there, emphasises their public character and welcomes the enrolment of all, whether Catholic or not, who desire a Catholic education for their children. And, because such schools are part of the public provision of school education, they are fee-free.
At the time of the Karmel Interim Report (1973) — effectively restoring public funding for Catholic schools after being cut off for nearly a century — Education Minister Susan Ryan discussed with the National Catholic Education Commission the question of a fully-funded integrated school arrangement, similar to the model whereby Catholic schools in New Zealand are publicly funded.
At no stage were those who canvassed this as a superior alternative to the current model, which partly but differentially funds all Australian non-government schools, consulted. The net effect was to diminish Catholic school funding as a social justice discourse as well as to introduce a 'private school funding' issue that has been shut down in all other countries.
Perhaps the reason for this was the abject opposition by the Defence of Government Schools (DOGS) lobby to any tampering with the secular clause in any of the state-based Education Acts. However, the balance of legal and public opinion on this matter has shifted.
Further obstacles, now non-existent, were advanced against NZ-style integration, chief among which was fear of a takeover of Catholic schools by statist forces, now manifestly in decline as school-choice inexorably becomes a major justification for a funding policy responsive to the neoliberal impulse for the state to withdraw from large-scale public provision of essential services.
Meanwhile, 'provisional' NZ integration agreements, initially cumbersome and requiring diocesan and congregational owners to refurbish their schools before availing of full funding, were relaxed and restrictions on setting up new Catholic schools lifted.
In fact, all NZ Catholic schools are now integrated, including schools with the same socio-economic profile as Kincoppal-Rose Bay in Sydney (pictured), such as Baradene in Auckland. In other words, the charisms and other identities of NZ Catholic schools have not changed a jot and integration has benefitted the mission of NZ Catholic schools in ways that now compare unenviably with their Australian counterparts.
Thus, the original Australian dispensation, won against entrenched anti-clerical interests from the DOGS lobby and fought for mainly by Catholics, was achieved at the hidden cost of reconstructing Catholic schools in the public mind as private schools. Since the mid-70s, then, what was once a virtually Catholic funding dispensation scandalously resulted in a burgeoning Australian private school sector, a phenomenon non-existent elsewhere and considerably out of kilter with contemporary constructions of Catholic schools as bastions of social justice.
In the UK, as elsewhere in the OECD, independent schools receive no public subsidies, as do the handful of Catholic private schools there. Instead, such schools charge substantial fees to meet the market for clients seeking an alternative to a public education. Why cannot similar schools in Australia, Catholic or otherwise, opt to fund themselves entirely from their own lavish available and potential resources, as they already partly do?
The executive director of the Victorian Catholic Education Commission, Stephen Elder, argues that selective Australian state schools are most in breach of current funding-equity arrangements. Since principled arguments are marked by their consistency, educational practices that subsidise the wealthy, as much as privileging the select few, are surely deserving of his most unequivocal condemnation in an overall funding policy that is marked for its injustice as its inconsistency.
Dr Michael Furtado is a former Education Officer (Mission & Justice), Brisbane Catholic Education.