Education must be about freedom of choice

Australia is fortunate to have had parallel public and private education systems, established with bipartisan support and within a government regulatory framework, since the 1960s.

So Margaret Wenham's suggestion (The Courier-Mail, January 15) that we resort to a monopolistic, government-only, one-size-fits-all education system is as out of date as those who, in the 1940s, wanted to nationalise the banks or airline system, and limit private housing in favour of government housing commission estates, removing individual choice, demanding uniformity, limiting diversity and perpetuating a belief in government monopoly and that government knows best.

Surely grown-ups do not believe that any more. Haven't we seen enough government mistakes, white-elephant projects, wasted public spending and bureaucratic, centralised and inflexible decision-making to know that it is competition and choice that drives innovation, meets people's needs and promotes diversity?

The present dual public and non-government education system provides incentives for all education institutions to do better. Most importantly, it gives parents and their children real education choices not provided in many other countries.

This diversity reflects religious affiliation, teaching philosophies, cultural orientation, regional features or emphasis on activities like sport or specialised education needs and the very governance of the schools in terms of parental involvement.

But critics of the non-government education sector never get it. They never understand that choice matters. After all, why - in our increasingly diverse and tolerant society that likes choice in what we buy, how we live, the way we work - be somehow denied choice in relation to schools?

Critics ignore that parents have been voting with their feet and their hard-earned after-tax dollars for years to send their children to the schools they want, to meet their children's needs and to satisfy their standards.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the proportion of students attending government schools in 2007 was 66.4 per cent, down from 70.3 per cent in 1997. From 1997 to 2007 full-time student numbers attending government schools grew by 1.7 per cent, while for non-government schools the increase was 22 per cent.

Even in Canberra, the home of the federal bureaucracy and a well-endowed public school system, parents exercise choice. Nearly 41 per cent of students in the ACT attend non-government schools - the highest proportion in the nation.

Nor do critics understand the limited nature of public funding of the non-government sector. While the Catholic sector receives 75 per cent of its revenue from government, the fast-growing independent school sector receives only 35 per cent of its total funding from the public coffers.

They conveniently ignore parental contributions in fees and donations and that parents pay for the land and start-up costs of new schools and most of the ongoing capital costs.

All this saves the taxpayers billions of dollars.

Moreover, critics do not appreciate that public funding to independent schools increasingly is based on the socio-economic status of students that reduces accordingly. Critics never appreciate that government schools with similar student profiles are not so penalised.

Most importantly, critics of the dual-education model that has developed in Australia since the 1960s overlook the fact we do not have an education system dominated by a monopoly supplier - the government, where one size fits all. Instead, we have choice and, dare we say it, competition. This keeps both systems honest.

The problem is that it is not a level playing field for the non-government sector. It is regulated by government education departments that are also providers of a competing but increasingly unfavoured service.

Let's have a real level playing field in education and attach the dollars to the student rather than to systems.

Let parents make the choice of what school and let the dollars flow accordingly. My prediction is that, if this was allowed, public school enrolments would decline even faster unless the public education system became more responsive to education needs, parental demands and quality education outcomes.