Ideas@TheCentre
RIP Private Education?
Over the last few months there has been a lot of speculation about whether the global financial crisis has affected enrolments in private schools.
The newspapers can’t seem to make up their minds. In the last weekend of January, The Age reported that ‘parents are abandoning public schools’ for the private sector. A week later, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that ‘private schools feel the squeeze’ in the economic downturn, with a recent rush on enrolments in public schools. The Daily Telegraph’s education editor, Maralyn Parker, has gleefully declared that it is ‘the beginning of the end for private schools.’ You wish, Maralyn, you wish.
So what is the real story? According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data, enrolments in the non-government school sector grew by more than 21,000 students from 2007 to 2008, an increase of 2%. Enrolments in the government school sector dropped by almost 4,000 students from 2007 to 2008, a decrease of 0.2%.
This data clearly does not indicate an exodus from private schools. But perhaps the rate of growth in the non-government school sector has declined. Are enrolments still increasing, but more slowly than before?
Not according to ABS data. The annual average rate of growth in non-government schools for the decade from 1997 to 2007 was approximately 2%. Basically, no different to the most recent year. The government sector also grew in the decade 1997 to 2007, but only by 0.2% on average each year. The deflation in the government sector in 2008 shows that it is actually the government school sector that has experienced a contraction in numbers.
Enrolments for this year are not yet available, but some commentators have pounced on the findings of a survey of 96 public school principals that suggests that there has been a higher than usual transfer of students into public schools from independent and Catholic schools. This is a small sample and it may or may not reflect reality. Only time will tell—but there is no reason to sound the death knell for private schools. Not yet.
Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at the CIS.
