The analysis by advocacy group Save Our Schools charts the social composition and concentration of disadvantage across the Australian school system using My School profile data, finding our public schools bear the biggest burden by far – and with fewer resources to draw upon. 

Public schools enrol the vast proportion of low SEA students in every state and territory, the report flags.

Some 80.5 per cent of students from low SEA backgrounds attend public schools, compared to 11.8 per cent in Catholic schools and 7.7 per cent in independent schools, it found.

Trevor Cobbold, Save Our Schools national convenor and a former economist for the Productivity Commission, says the analysis disproves claims made by Catholic school authorities that their schools serve a similar student population to the public system.

“These figures show it's just not true,” he tells EducationHQ.

“It's false – and even Catholic spokespeople 20 years ago were getting worried that they weren't serving low-income families.

“In fact, I remember a comment from [one leader of the Church] that he was concerned about fee increases in Catholic schools excluding low-income families.

“And around the same time, there were similar comments from some leaders of Catholic education authorities … our figures confirm that 20 years later, Catholic schools serve a different demographic profile than public schools.”

According to Cobbold, claims made by independent school organisations that 60 per cent of families with students in their system are from low to middle-income households are also ‘demonstrably false’ – a claim he reports was recently made by Independent Schools Australia chief executive Graham Catt.

“It is true that some of their schools are low SES and they do serve a low proportion of low-income families.

“But what they do is always use those examples to justify giving more government funding to their high-income schools.

“They say, ‘we serve low to middle-income families’. Well, they serve very few low-income families,” he contends.

Interestingly, the analysis found there was a larger proportion of independent schools with a high concentration of low SEA students than Catholic schools across five jurisdictions.

Australia has one of the most socially segregated education systems in the OECD, and the latest PISA report highlights this, Cobbold notes.

His analysis found that in 2023, 90.9 per cent of schools with more than 50 per cent of their students in the lowest SEA quartile were public schools.

Just 4 per cent were Catholic schools and 5.2 per cent were independent schools.

Cobbold said segregation was occurring to a high degree, effectively producing the ‘double jeopardy effect’ on student achievement.

He explains this occurs where children from low SES families, who broadly have poorer outcomes than those from wealthier backgrounds, stand to have their disadvantage intensified when they form a high proportion of enrolments in public schools.

“So, there's a family background effect and a school effect.

“And what our research shows is that there's a high degree of social segregation in Australian schools.

“Apart from its educational effect, it has social effects in the sense that students from different backgrounds are not growing up together, and that has implications for social tolerance and understanding of people from different backgrounds,” Cobbold added.

The effects of our segregated education system are playing out in international assessments, the report warns.

We know that results for students of all socio-economic backgrounds tend to improve when they attend schools with a larger proportion of high SES students, the report highlights.

Cobbold notes a recent meta-analysis which found schools’ SES has a large impact on student outcomes and was in fact more influential than children’s own SES background.  

“That's hard to explain … but I suspect it's because those schools are actually so under-resourced, in terms of facing teacher shortages and educational material resources, that's that having a bigger effect,” he says.

The effects of our segregated education system and underfunded public schools are playing out in international assessments, the report warns.

“For example, the results from PISA 2022 show that the raw scores of students in Catholic and independent schools in reading, mathematics and science were significantly higher than those in public schools.

“The gaps between public and Catholic schools disappeared after adjustments for differences in family socio-economic background while the gaps between public and independent schools were halved or more…” it states.

Cobbold says he does not envisage a shift in the landscape anytime soon.

“I can't see it changing because we're constantly seeing - when you look at the figures - government funding for private schools has been increasing much faster.

“In some cases, double the funding per student that public schools get, and as long as that funding keeps going up, that's funding more people to go into the private system.

“And most of those, as I've said, are middle-income to high-income families.”

Cobbold argues that the continual underfunding of the nation's public schools lies at the heart of the problem.

“Private schools are actually being overfunded, they're funded to more than 100 per cent of the schooling resource standard (SRS), public schools are currently at around 87 per cent.

“While there's underfunding, it's going to make it more virtually impossible to meet [learning] standards.”

Even the new school funding deal the Federal Government has struck with the Victorian, South Australian and Western Australian governments is problematic, Cobbold says.

“At least those new agreements offer a real prospect of fully funding public schools, but it's not until 2034.

“I mean, that's another 10 years of underfunding, basically. Public schools are just up against it.”