Fifty years ago this week, Prime Minister Robert Menzies set in train a policy which still stirs up controversy and division – the clash between private and public education.

Menzies did it in his classic understated and politically artful way. The policy was stated in just 78 words, more than 5000 words in to his 7000-word election manifesto for the election to be held on 30 November 1963.

He said, “Third, there is a special need for improved science teaching in the secondary schools, if we are to keep in step with the march of science. As some recognition of this need, we will make available five million pounds per annum (about $120 million in today’s money) for the provision of building and equipment facilities for science teaching in secondary schools. The amount will be distributed on a school population basis, and will be available to all secondary schools, Government or independent, without discrimination.”
 
It was the start of state aid. Hitherto, the Commonwealth Government had given no money to independent schools. In the early 1960s, the Catholic system was on the verge of collapse, but until the Menzies promise, neither side budged – each thinking the voters were rusted on and would not change on this issue. How naïve. Menzies saw his chance.

The year before, a state health official had demanded a Catholic school in Goulburn install three extra toilets which it could not afford. The Catholic schools in Goulburn were closed in protest and the students sent to flood the state schools to prove the point.

But notice how Menzies dealt with the issue. He twisted the policy to the advantage of the wealthy. Instead of giving money where it was needed – for basic education in the Catholic system, Menzies laid the foundation for educational division and inequality in Australia. It has been made worse by his conservative successors for half a century and is still a blight on our education system today.

He gave the money to secondary schools. He distributed it “on a school population basis”. He gave it equally to rich, independent schools as well as the poor schools in the Catholic system. He gave the money to buildings and equipment for science teaching, not for teachers or ordinary classrooms – or toilets, the very things that sparked the controversy.

Orwell would have been proud. According to Menzies, the money would be available “without discrimination”. In fact, it was viciously discriminatory. It added wealth to already wealthy schools and deprived the rest because the education budget is a finite cake.

He used the plea for help from a deprived segment of the education system to heap wealth upon those who did not need it. No Labor Government has had the nerve to reverse the trend. Contrary to the view in the 1950s, government aid to independent schools is indeed a vote changer.

It now runs to $10 billion a year, almost 100 times more than in Menzies’ time.

Under the Howard Government, the very wealthy schools were included under an egregious formula that has the pretence of giving more to needier independent schools.

The formula funds schools according to the socio-economic status of the communities that they draw their students from. It determines that by looking at the residential address of the students and the Australian Bureau of Statistics information about the people in immediately area of each address.

But the formula is flawed because the socio-economic status of the families sending their children to private schools is usually at the higher end of the people in a given area. Nonetheless, tut the funding goes on – now $6820 per student. Obviously, ever more students have flocked to independent schools. This is because it is a bargain. Spend a dollar and get up to a dollar free from the government.

It no longer has much to do with religious conviction. It is much more about money. The ACT -- the wealthiest and least religious of the state and territories -- has the highest portion of students in private schools (40 per cent). The nationwide average is 35 per cent, the highest in the OECD. The OECD average is just 17 per cent. And most of those OECD countries with a higher proportion of public education are beating Australia in education outcomes.

Finland, with the highest proportion of students in government schools (96 per cent), regularly tops the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests in science, literacy and maths.

Australia’s education system is a bit like the US health system – more costly for a poorer outcome because the private element is too high. But the best system in the world for the few who can pay for it.

The reason parents send their children to private schools is because on average they get a better education. There are several reasons for this. First, more money is spent on children in the private system. Secondly, the students self-select so that children of the diligent middle classes go to private schools and those with home environments less conducive to education go to public schools. Thirdly, the schools are selective – the disruptive, handicapped, difficult students are discouraged. Fourthly, more decentralised, independent decision-making yields better results.

The ACT Schools Census released this week is telling. Indigenous students go to private schools at half the rate of other students (20 per cent against 40 per cent). The Gonski inquiry was told: “The vast majority of low income (77 per cent), indigenous (83 per cent), disability (80 per cent) provincial (72 per cent) and remote/very remote (83 per cent) students attend government schools.

So this is fine for the students who get a private education, but it is at the expense of overall education standards and of social cohesion in Australia. The religious divide in education in the 1950s has been overcome as religion decreased in importance. But it has been replaced by an economic divide.

The more the middle classes flee the public system, the worse the public system will become and the more political pressure there will be to increase government funding for private schools.

Maybe the answer is perhaps to use the adage, if you can’t lick ‘em join ‘em. More public schools should be given their independence, so principals and school boards can hire and fire and determine financial priorities. And the funding formula should change so that those independent public schools have less of a financial disadvantage over fee-charging schools so the middle classes return to the public system and nurture and nourish it.

Half a century of state aid has resulted overall in a worse education system and one that can only get worse if this trend continues.

crispin.hull@rubyreef.com.au