When Scots College, an elite private boys school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, opened a $60 million replica Scottish castle to house its library last year, the stark divide between public and private schools in Australia found its most gaudy, shameless expression. Until, perhaps, that same school reportedly purchased a $13,000 life-sized taxidermied camel to be displayed in the new castle-cum-library.
For elite private schools like Scots, extravagant capital works like these are unexceptional and indeed encouraged by the inequitable funding system maintained by federal and state governments. According to a new report by the Australian Education Union (AEU), The building divide in Australian schools: How capital funding fuels educational inequity, private schools have outspent public schools on capital works by $38 billion over the past decade.
In 2023, just three private schools—St Kevin’s College and Caulfield Grammar in Melbourne, and Monte Sant’Angelo Mercy School in Sydney—together spent more on capital infrastructure than 56 percent of all public schools in Australia combined. Their collective $290 million capital works budget services just 6,789 students, compared to 938,470 for a comparable figure within the public school system.
The full measure of this capital works inequity becomes clear when viewed in relation to the least funded and most disadvantaged public school settings. In 2021, seven private schools spent more individually on capital works than what was invested in all Northern Territory public schools that year. Similarly, from 2017 to 2021, two NSW private schools spent more on capital works than the entire state of Tasmania.
The capital works undertaken by private schools do not just project and concretely increase their wealth; they express and enhance the opportunities and experiences afforded to students in and outside the classroom.
The AEU reports, for instance, that St Kevin’s College has expanded its junior campus to deliver new sporting facilities, state-of-the-art STEM classrooms and a very large playground. Caulfield Grammar, meanwhile, developed a five-storey learning hub for senior school students. It is the first building within Australian schools to be WELL Gold certified—an international accreditation for building projects that meet exceptional sustainability standards and are designed to maximise human wellbeing and comfort.
For many public school students, by contrast, cramped, damp, poorly ventilated and asbestos-riddled demountables are the norm. These structures—which are meant to be temporary but more often than not are permanent—not only present occupational health and safety issues for staff and students, but are also more costly to run than regular classrooms. Needless to say, they win no awards for their contribution to wellbeing or comfort.
They also have a negative impact on learning. As one Victorian primary school principal explains, “There is an increased need to have spaces for small group tutoring or intervention to meet the needs of students with disabilities”. Demountables simply have no space for this, which means students don’t get the help they need.
The reality is that some students simply matter more than others. Capital investment in private schools per student averaged $2,746 annually between 2014 and 2023, compared to $1,237 per student annually in public schools over the same period.
Compounding this is the already inequitable distribution of recurrent Commonwealth contributions to private and public schools. Private school fees alone often exceed the funding needs of students, meaning that regular government contributions function as free money, often invested in capital works on top of the specific capital works funding. This entrenches the divide between public and private schools, with the latter accumulating more and more capital at the expense of the former.
Seen in this light, the capital works disparity across public and private schools is a symptom of a deeper, systemic malaise: the chronic, bipartisan underfunding of public schools.
That is why it is not enough to point the finger, as the AEU has done, at the Liberal Turnbull federal government, which in 2017 shamefully ceased the Commonwealth’s long-term capital funding stream for public schools. Labor state governments are also ripping funding from public schools. Victoria—supposedly the “education state”—is a case in point. Last year, it was accused by the Age of denying $2.4 billion to Victorian schools by delaying the implementation of its Gonski reforms.
For all students to access education—including facilities that make learning possible, safe and even enjoyable—we need a complete overhaul of the school system and the politics of the major parties, which have left working-class families and young people to languish, while the elite luxuriate in world-class, feudal-themed luxury facilities.
