Union bid to slash Catholic school funds

Sydney
13 July 2003

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Union bid to slash Catholic school funds

By Chris Lindsay

A move by the Australian Education Union - the national union of state school teachers - to slash Federal funding to Catholic schools is based on a lie, says the Council of Catholic School Parents.

The union has reportedly raised $1million to run a campaign before the next federal election, with a group of 12 Federal MPs formed to lobby for more funding for government schools.

NSW Teachers’ Federation president Maree O’Halloran says the non-government school lobby is “using the issue of values as their way of justifying the diversion of enormous, staggering, obs-cene amounts of money, supplemented by the State Government”.

But Roger O’Sullivan, executive officer of the Catholic parents’ group, says the attempt to slash funding to Catholic schools is based on a false premise.

“It is a lie to say Catholic schools are over-funded,” he says. “In fact, statistics show that the student-teacher ratio in Catholic schools is higher than in government schools.

“There is a tendency to lump in all private schools as being wealthy schools.

“Yet very few Catholic schools could be classified as being wealthy...the family income profiles for Catholic schools are similar to those for parents who enrol their children in government schools.”

The issue, Mr O’Sullivan says, is “quality education for all children”.

“There is currently a gap of $2000 a year between the income Catholic schools get from government sources and the actual cost of schooling,” he said. “This means that parents who send their children to government schools actually get $2000 more of taxpayers dollars per student than those who send their children to Catholic schools.

“This $2000 difference is, of course, made up by fees and fund-raising by the schools.

“Catholic schools are not being treated favourably, as the union would have people believe. If that were so, parents of children at Catholic schools would not have to pay fees.

“The public perception of this has come about because some non-government schools, not those run by the Catholic education system, receive funding based on the socio-economic status of the parents, which is related to the census data for their postcode.

“Those Catholic schools in this category are run by religious congregations.

“But there are very few schools like this. Those within the Catholic system just get their 56 per cent.”

Mr O’Sullivan says 30,000 families in NSW have children in both Catholic and government schools, particularly “in country areas where the local Catholic school may not go to years 11 and 12”.

A source in the Catholic Education Commission said the National Catholic Schools Commission would like Fed-eral funding for systemic schools to go to 60 per cent, but this is not likely in the near future.

“The vast bulk of Catholic schools just get the 56 per cent payment from the Commonwealth Government and some extra funds from the state government,” he said.

“We are not arguing for a bigger slice of the cake, we are arguing for a bigger cake.”

A cut in funds to Catholic schools would not guarantee extra Federal funds for government schools, he said. They are traditionally funded by state governments.