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King's School
The entrance to one of Australia's elite private schools, the King's School in Parramatta, NSW. Photograph: April Fonti/AAP Photograph: April Fonti/AAP
The entrance to one of Australia's elite private schools, the King's School in Parramatta, NSW. Photograph: April Fonti/AAP Photograph: April Fonti/AAP

Datablog: private schools are winning over Australian parents

This article is more than 10 years old

A new report shows more parents than ever are sending their children to private schools and there are some notable trends among enrolments

Australians are increasingly choosing private education over public education, according to a report out on Tuesday.

The report mentions the rising proportion of enrolments in private schools, but doesn’t go into much detail on this specifically, instead focusing on attitudes towards public and private education.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics maintains a long-running dataset on school enrolments, and has the breakdown on government versus non-government enrolments going back to 1960:

From this we can see an obvious increase in private school enrolments over time.
There’s also a pronounced difference between the proportions of students enrolled at public and private when split into primary and secondary schooling:

This suggests some parents are happy to send their kids to a public primary school, but then opt to pay more when they graduate to high school.

There’s also a small gender gap, with a higher proportion of male students in public schools.

Oddly, this difference is not reflected in private schools. In fact there seems to be a lower proportion of female students overall (I checked this with the ABS, just to be sure), with the percentage of female students declining from 49.17 in 1999 to 48.87 in 2013.

Internationally, Australia has a relatively high proportion of students in private schools, though the definition of private varies from country to country.

The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment surveys 510,000 students between the ages of 15 and 16 in 65 countries on various educational skills, and also records whether the type of school they attend.

The survey breaks schools into three categories: government or public (schools directly controlled or managed by a public or government education authority or agency), government-dependent private schools (schools that receive 50% or more of their core funding from government agencies), and government-independent private schools (schools that receive less than 50% of their funding from government agencies).

Australia has a comparatively high percentage of “government-independent private schools”, some nine percentage points above the OECD average. This is probably the category most people think of when they refer to private schools – independent schools mostly dependent on fees.

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