One of the things they conceal is their methods of discipline, including whether or not they use the cane.

$1.4 billion class secrets
Article from: Sunday Herald Sun
Ellen Whinnett
December 28, 2008 12:00am

VICTORIA'S top private schools are keeping any problems with crime, violence or unruly behaviour secret, denying parents the chance to make informed decisions about their children's education.

Despite sharing in a federal funds pool of $1.4 billion in the past year, 29 of 30 schools surveyed by the Sunday Herald Sun refused to provide basic information about their non-academic performance.

State schools must release the information under Freedom of Information.

And Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has told Australia's independent schools they must be more transparent to share in a $28 billion Federal Government funding boost in the next four years.

Only Trinity Grammar was prepared to divulge the information. Its figures showed the school had an almost trouble-free year, with a handful of suspensions and no expulsions, assaults or major injuries.

Ten schools would not answer or referred questions to the Association of Independent Schools of Victoria.

The association's Brian Peck claimed the schools reported such information to the Federal Department of Education and the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority.

"We suggest you contact those authorities," Mr Peck said.

But the authority said it did not require schools to report on the areas outlined in the Sunday Herald Sun's questions. The only information it required schools to report was student attendance.

And the Federal Department of Education's guidelines show the schools only had to report on a range of academic areas.

The schools were required to declare average attendance rates, but other reporting requirements related to areas such as "parent, student and teacher satisfaction".

Schools were free to provide "as much further information on their activities and outcomes as they wish".

Despite that, no school, other than Trinity, was prepared to answer questions.

Nineteen schools did not reply to letters or phone calls.

Carey Baptist Grammar would not comment, nor would Leibler Yavneh.

St Kevin's College said it would "absolutely not give that information out", while Mentone Grammar said its principal would not have an opportunity to respond.

Of the schools surveyed, Beth Rivkah, Ballarat Clarendon College, Brighton Grammar, Mount Scopus, Tintern and Ruyton Girls School handballed the issue to the association.

Scotch College, Haileybury, Xavier College, Melbourne Grammar, Geelong Grammar, St Patrick's College Ballarat, Lauriston Girls' School, Ivanhoe Grammar, Kilvington Girls' Grammar, the Peninsula School, Wesley College, the King David School, Geelong College, Caulfield Grammar, De La Salle College, Genazzano College, Brighton Montessori School, Penleigh and Essendon Grammar and Camberwell Girls Grammar did not respond to letters or calls.

Sorry, though this looks interesting, where does CP come into it?

I'm not familiar with the law in Victoria re Private Schools & CP.


Thanks for your anticipated elucidations.



Steve M

The people I aimed it at know what I am talking about already but I suppose I should explain for other people.

Corporal punishment was banned in government run schools in Victoria in 1982 by a Ministerial order which was later incorporated into Education Department Regulations. Both of these types of documents are only followed by government schools. Private schools are allowed to totally ignore them and a lot of them do.

Private schools argue that because they are private bodies, they shouldn't be subject to public scrutiny. But they receive billions of dollars in taxpayers money and if the public are expected to pay for these schools, then at the very least we should have the right to know how they operate. Government schools can be compelled to reveal information on a wide range of subjects including discipline and punishment. Private schools cannot.

The 2006 Education and Training Reform Act supposedly gives the government more power to set policies for private schools but unless private schools are subject to scrutiny, how can anyone tell what policies are needed?

In particular, the 2006 act allows for the refusal to register any school using corporal punishment (meaning any school using the cane or strap could eventually be shut down). The body responsible for these decisions is the VRQA - the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority. This article says that the only information the VRQA requires private schools to tell them is attendance figures - how can the VRQA police corporal punishment if they are not allowed to make private schools tell them about it, and if private schools refuse to answer questions on school discipline voluntarily?

This is about more than just corporal punishment - there are 25 schools that still produce 75% of all the powerful people in this state. 25 schools with that much power who are answerable to nobody, but get billions in funds. We need major reform but to start with the least we should be able to expect is transparency.

Thanks.

I wasn't quite sure what the situation was with the non-state sector.

Simple answer to me, as you now have a new Government, is stop funding these schools from the public purse. Or demand, if they can't survive without said funds, they end CP & religiously report all the required stuff into the public domain.

These bastards are the ones who should be over a barrel-not the Gov, or the tax-payer. Revive the spirit of Ned Kelly, this is Victoria we are talking about, anyway!


Steve M

The notion of private schools does seem to provoke hostility. I presume that they get no more government funding per child than is spent in government schools and possibly less. I understand that some parents who can afford it are willing to pay extra to get something more than provided in the government schools. An important question is whether the existence of private schools disadvantages others.

Children whose parents show an interest in the child's education in a government school, and in the school, are advantaged over those who don't. However, all children at the school are likely to benefit if enough parents involve themselves in the schools affairs. If these parents remove their children to a private school, or decide to live near a good school, the benefit is lost.

People with money are at advantage over those without in many more ways than just education.

The notion that those receiving government money should disclose whatever information a taxer payer requests is also an interesting one. We all receive government services. Where is the line to be drawn?

CP has fallen out of favour in most schools. If it is still used in some private Victorian schools presumably the parents know about and don't object. My understanding is that most boys at schools with CP don't object to it. The existence of schools with and without CP provides opportunities for comparisons. If appropriate CP were to be shown to be safe and useful some might be embarrassed.

Though not an exact comparison, if I apply for Govt. benefits, I'd be expected to reveal the proverbial ins and outs of a fly's eyeball, regardless of whether the benefit in question is means-tested or not.

So there's an argument that organisations should be at least as duty-bound to reveal their statistics if they want to receive public funds. Let's face it, under FOIA, whether here in GB or Victoria, Govt departments are under intense scrutiny about how they spend money, so why should others be exempt?

On the CP issue, they are hardly going to boast we caned 100's, as that will allow people to say their system doesn't work. If they say they caned none, then the parents who do send their kids their for that reason alone will withdraw their support. So, another good reason for adopting an unambiguous position and dropping it.

I'd suspect, if these schools need Govt. funding that their funds are dwindling. That, in turn, might well mean falling pupil rolls. And if that is the case, why?

Could it just be that there is in fact such limited information available on CP & a host of other matters, that parents are so ruddy confused, they just don't bother, and that's why their numbers of pupils are going down?

Intriguing little subject altogether-you'd think at least some of these establishments would actually be trumpeting any achievements, because this is also a competitive market and always has been.


Steve M

Agreed, the Independent School fo Victoria are engaged in a disturbing culture of secrecy. This is where our venerable, cane-wielding Dr. Dominum is deputy head. They have so many excuses about "student privacy" to hide behind and thus keep their secret but I suggest that if they are behaving properly and believe in what they are doing then there would be no need for secrecy.

I'd better make clear I'm only an honorary Victorian!!

Seriously, if the Govt here uses part of my tax to do something I dislike, that's tough & also democracy, like it or lump it. Most of what the Govt does with it is subject to that FOIA, so the old conspiracy theorists can rest easy! Same, I suspect for most in Oz or Vic.

But, if part of that tax revenue is being given directly to private schools or companies, then I think we should have the same criteria applied. To bend what a much-lamented clown who was US Agriculture Secretary once said about the Papacy & birth control:-You no playa-a da game, you no make-a da rules!

Whether or not the privates have anything to hide, I can't say. I'm also not getting involved in any individual dissing of Doctor D.

But I do feel the private schools are unlikely to elicit much public sympathy by thinking they are above the rules. And doing it in a country like Australia, which is (thank God)the one place on Earth where Jack knows, let alone thinks, he's as good as his master, is suicidal.


Steve M

I am going to try and address the points raised in this thread from the perspective of somebody who is involved in running an independent school - to try and give our perspective.

Yes, private schools receive some government funding in Australia - a fraction of that received by government schools (and rightly so). Precisely how much government funding a private school receives is worked out via some pretty complicated formulas, but, per student, it's always less than a state school, it's virtually always less than half of what a state school receives, and it's often considerably less than that. The 'elite' private schools tend to receive the least government funding but it's not absolutely the case because the classification of a school as 'elite' is a rather nebulous one and while most schools in that category tend to be fairly wealthy schools serving a reasonably comfortably off clientele, it's not universally the case.

Why do we receive government funding? There's a lot of reasons but what it really comes down to at its most basic is that funding private schools actually saves the government money and allows for even more money to be put into state schools. Why?

It's simple mathematics - for simplicity's sake, let's say every student in a government school receives $11,000 a year in government funding, while every student in an independent school receives $4,000 a year (these numbers are approximately correct - I don't have time to seek out exact numbers especially at a time at year when a lot of the people I'd have to ask are on holiday - but they are pretty close). About 25% of students attend private schools with 75% attending government schools.

Let's say that $4,000 a year was taken away from private schools to be redistributed in the state sector. As a result of this some private schools would close, and others would raise their fees, meaning some students would be withdrawn. If as a result of that change, the proportion of private school students dropped from 25% to 15%, this would more than offset the gain to government school students - instead of receiving $11,000 a year for each students they'd now be receiving $10,882.35.

Increased overall funding doesn't necessarily mean increased funding per student - not when the method of increasing the funding involves increasing the number of students you're now paying full cost for instead of less than half.

We also need to consider that there are a wide range of different types of private schools.

Schools like mine - the 'elite' independent schools could, for the most part, get on quite nicely without government funding. If we lose $3,000 a year in government money (elite schools do receive less than private schools on average) - well, most parents who can and are willing to pay $18,000 a year could come up with $21,000 and we have waiting lists that could more than replace any students we did lose.

But it's important to realise that we are only a minority of private schools - most are not elite schools. For a school that charges fees of $4,000 a year (and there are plenty that do have fees at that level - and even some that have much lower fees) to suddenly lose $5,000 in funding (in the same way that 'elite' schools receive less government funding than the average, cheaper private schools tend to be receiving a bit more) - that's likely to be devastating. They'd have to more than double their fees to compensate - they'd lose students or close.

The bottom line is this - cutting funding to private schools will not have much effect at all on rich schools, or rich families. It's the cheaper private schools providing increased educational choice to the average family that would find it hard to remain viable and accessible. For the 'elite' schools, while it won't affect us that much, overall, it would make us less accessible to families on the margin - you'd wind up making 'elite' schools even less accessible than they already are, and reduce opportunities for people at lower income levels without really affecting those from more comfortable backgrounds. From a perspective of social equity, you'd be doing a lot more harm than good.

Now - given that we receive government funding, what responsibilities should come with that funding? That's a perfectly reasonable question in my view.

Let me start by saying that both the state and federal governments require us to provide them with a great deal of information as a condition of government funding. They also require us to follow particular policies as a condition of that funding. We provide that information as requested and required. The government is free to release that information if it chooses to. Historically, it's chosen not to release most of this information - why? In my view, it's because if they released this information to the public about private schools, they'd find it very hard not to release it about their own schools - and in the vast majority of cases, it would be likely to embarass them far more than it would embarass us.

The question raised by the article cited here doesn't relate to whether or not we should have to give this information to a government body that's involved in our funding. It relates to whether or not we should have to give this information to a privately owned, profit-driven, newspaper.

That's not the same thing.

There's a few problems with the request in my view. The first is that the Herald Sun's 'survey' specifically targeted only those schools they see as 'elite' private schools (incidentally, as I said earlier, the definition of 'elite' is rather nebulous, and their definition doesn't match mine perfectly). Over the last couple of years, the Victorian media has mounted a number of attacks on private schools where they have exagerated minor incidents, or have taken a serious incident and suggested it represents wider problems than it actually does. We are no longer confident that the mainstream media is willing to treat us fairly and to report accurately about us. They seem to have an agenda against us. It makes us far less comfortable in cooperating with them. Also, some of their conduct has, in our view, been questionable - there has been a recent case where a student - still legally a child - was hounded by the press because he'd been disciplined by his school. The school had deliberately handled the matter with discretion because it was aware of issues in the boy's life. The media wrecked that. It creates a real question of whether we would be acting in the best interests of our students to cooperate.

More importantly, though - they've asked for this information at the worst possible time. It's the middle of the summer/Christmas holidays. Nineteen out of thirty schools didn't respond to letters or phone calls? Well, that's hardly surprising given that most of us have been shut down or working with skeleton staffs since mid December. If you want an answer to a question about a school, it's a good idea to ask it when the school is open.

As for the claim that the VRQA only asks us about school attendance, it's a brand new organisation that is still being set up.

I understand the situation in Western Australia is a little different. Private schools are not subject to a CP ban in the same way as state schools. I am aware that some private schools still use CP, albeit much less frequently than in past years.

I can understand private schools not wishing to talk to Joe Public about their CP policies, given the hysteria that attaches to the subject and the social engineers who would use the information to give them grief. Private schools, after all, exist to meet their parents' expectations and it is matters such as discipline that influence parental choice.

I don't wish to comment without research on the vexed question of the levels of funding that flow to private versus state schools, but private schools must differentiate from public ones to gain market share. If the State were to dictate to them in detail these schools would lose their edge.

As a general principle I prefer to keep Govt interference in people's lives to a minimum and leave room for individuality.