What's causing social segregation in our schools?

For the purposes of judging whether low income families could afford subsidised fees to cover private school recurrent costs in 2011, this article proposes a rough proxy for such fees: in this case, 2011's AGSRC ($10,583), minus a 60% rate of Federal subsidy ($6,350), minus the average State/Territory subsidy ($2,220); that is, about $2,000 per student over K-Year12.

While the above AGSRC value underlying this fee estimate falls well short of other conceptions of Government school recurrent costs, the fee value so derived represented 3% of AEU's defined upper income boundary for low income families in 2011. Families with progressively lower incomes in this band, or with more than one child, faced exit costs that loomed progressively higher – reaching towards 10% of their income, or beyond.

Several hypotheses contributing to student segregation emerge from this brief review:

• Many low income families faced significant costs to exit public schools, likely exceeding their capacity to pay, especially in the case of the poorest, partly explaining public schools' high retention rates for their children.
• Most high income families could easily outbid their low income neighbours when competing for places in the same private schools; many also had the extra resources to deal with even higher exit costs when reaching for the more expensive ones.
• Families with fewer children could more easily overcome exit costs and enrol their children in private schools, thus creating yet another form of segregation, at both ends of the income spectrum, but one apparently not highlighted yet with research data.

The phenomenon of social segregation in our schools, whether pre- or post-Gonski, deserves to have these and other likely causes subjected to more rigorous investigation.

In the meantime, it is hard to ignore the role of policy: its contribution to segregation from offering low income families subsidies for private schooling that are significantly smaller than those offered to all families for public schooling.