This is not an opinion piece. It’s a summary of the published evidence on private versus public schooling in Australia, with a link to the source behind every number. Where the research is contested or thin, I say so instead of filling the gap with my own view, and where there’s good evidence against my summary I’ve included it.
Every summer a version of the same argument happens at a barbecue somewhere in Australia. Is private school worth it? Most of the argument is vibes. So I went and read the actual research and the actual funding data, and wrote down what I found.
I’ve focused on high school, because that’s where most of the money and most of the switching happens. Primary school gets a mention where the numbers differ.
The short version
- Public schools get more government money per kid, not less. In 2024 the average government school student got about $19,550 a year from governments. Catholic school students got about $16,600 and independent school students about $13,800.
- But private schools have more money overall. Total income per student was $20,368 in government schools, $22,067 in Catholic schools and $28,642 in independent schools. Fees make up the difference.
- Almost all public schools are funded below the official minimum standard. Most private schools are at or above theirs.
- Fees range from about $4,000 a year at a Catholic systemic school to $55,380 for Year 12 at Geelong Grammar. Over 13 years of schooling, Futurity estimates a city family spends $113,594 government, $247,174 Catholic, $369,594 independent.
- Private school kids do not do better in NAPLAN once you account for family background. They also don’t improve faster between Year 3 and Year 9.
- Private school kids do worse at university than public school kids with the same ATAR. The best estimate is about 3 points, though the studies behind it are 20 years old.
- The strongest evidence pointing the other way: Marks used every Victorian ATAR awarded in 2011 and found a genuine private school effect of 4.5 to 6 ATAR ranks that survives controlling for Year 9 NAPLAN.
- The wage advantage of an independent school education disappears entirely once you account for family background and how much education the person ended up with.
- Australia has one of the most socially segregated school systems in the OECD and it has been getting worse since 2006.
- Australian households pay a bigger share of school costs than almost anywhere else in the OECD. 21.4% of upper secondary funding here, against an OECD average of 9%.
- On bullying and belonging, private school students do report better experiences. This is one of the few gaps that hasn’t been tested against socioeconomic background, so treat it with caution.
- There’s no strong Australian evidence that the old school tie helps a career. Around two-thirds of Australian CEOs went to private schools, but nobody has shown the school did it.
How much money do private schools get per kid compared to public schools?
According to ACARA’s school income data for the 2024 calendar year, average income per student was:
- Government schools: $20,368, of which 96% came from governments (75% state, 21% Commonwealth)
- Catholic schools: $22,067, of which 75.2% came from governments
- Independent schools: $28,642, of which 48.2% came from governments
Do the maths and governments hand over roughly $19,550 per public school student, $16,600 per Catholic student and $13,800 per independent student. So on the narrow question of government dollars per head, public schools win.
On the other hand, total resources are what actually buys teachers and buildings, and there the independent sector is about $8,300 per student ahead of the public sector. Every year. For a school of 1,000 kids that’s over $8 million a year in extra spending power.
There’s a second layer to this. Australia has an agreed minimum funding level per student called the Schooling Resource Standard, or SRS. For 2026 the baseline is $14,467 per primary student and $18,180 per secondary student, with loadings on top for disadvantage. As Laura Perry at Murdoch University explains in The Conversation, only about 2% of public schools actually receive their full entitlement. The gap exists mostly because state governments, apart from the ACT, don’t pay their full share for their own schools. A good number of private schools sit at or above their standard, and the sector is being transitioned down to it over several years.
One more number worth knowing. Of the $91.04 billion in recurrent government funding for schools in 2023 to 2024, 75% went to government schools, which teach 62.8% of students. But 61.7% of Commonwealth funding went to non-government schools. The states fund public schools, Canberra funds private ones, and that split is why the argument never resolves.
How much does private school actually cost?
“Private school” covers an enormous range, and there’s no official national collection of fees, so treat any tier you see quoted as indicative. Peer-reviewed work cited by Perry puts the average Year 12 fee at independent schools in NSW and Victoria in 2024 at about $15,674, which is a lot lower than most people assume, because the independent sector has a long tail of low fee schools. Catholic systemic schools are cheaper again and in some dioceses charge under $3,000. At the other end, Geelong Grammar’s own 2026 fee schedule lists $55,380 for a Year 12 day boarder, which is among the highest in the country. Full boarding there is $93,840.
Fees aren’t the whole bill. Futurity’s 2026 Cost of Education report adds up uniforms, devices, camps, excursions and transport across all 13 years for a child starting school in 2026. One caveat before the numbers: Futurity sells education bonds, so a big projected cost suits them, and these figures are self published, survey based and projected 13 years forward. Nobody independent has replicated them. In major cities:
- Government: $113,594
- Catholic: $247,174
- Independent: $369,594
Melbourne independent is the worst at $435,902. Futurity also reckons 90% of the cost of a government education is those ancillary items, so “free” public school isn’t free either. That 90% is partly an artefact of dividing by a very small fee base, but the underlying point stands.
Do private school students do better in NAPLAN or the HSC?
In raw scores, yes. Once you account for who the students are, no.
The study usually cited is Larsen and colleagues in The Australian Educational Researcher. They tracked between 1,600 and 1,800 students at each of Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Their finding, in their words, was that “private schools are not associated with systematically higher average student achievement in primary or secondary school, nor with steeper trajectories of reading and numeracy from Year 3 to Year 9.”
Worth knowing about that study: the students come from a volunteer twin and sibling registry rather than a random sample of Australian kids, and the sample is small enough that it would probably miss a genuine but small effect. Keep that in mind when you get to the counter-evidence below.
The most interesting part of that study is what happened to the kids who switched. Students who did Years 3 and 5 at a public school and then moved to a private school for Years 7 and 9 scored highest of any group. But they were already the highest scorers back in public primary school, and switching didn’t change their rate of improvement. Private schools appear to be recruiting the strong students rather than creating them.
The same pattern shows up internationally. In PISA 2018, private school students scored higher in reading in 40 education systems before accounting for socioeconomic profile. After accounting for it, public school students came out ahead by 14 score points on average across the OECD, and were ahead in 19 systems.
The best evidence against all of this
I went looking for the strongest case on the other side, because an article that only finds evidence for one conclusion isn’t worth reading. Here it is.
Gary Marks, Australian Journal of Education, 2015. This is the serious one. Marks used the administrative records of every Victorian student who got an ATAR in 2011, more than 40,000 of them, linked to their own Year 9 NAPLAN results. Raw ATAR gaps were 9 ranks for Catholic and 17 for independent. After controlling for socioeconomic background, prior NAPLAN, gender and language background, Catholic schools were still 6 ranks ahead and independent schools 8 ranks ahead. He then ran a model using only students who switched sector between Year 9 and Year 12, which strips out everything stable about the student including the things nobody measures. The effect survived at 4.5 ranks for Catholic and 6 for independent.
That is population data, not a sample, with a prior achievement control and a within student design. It is much harder to wave away than the usual raw league table comparison, and I’m not going to try.
Marks again, Journal of School Choice, 2015. Same year, NAPLAN this time, bigger sample than Larsen. He found no sector effect at Years 3 and 5 once background and prior ability were accounted for, but a small independent school effect at Year 7 in numeracy, reading and writing, around 0.10 in effect size, which survived fixed effects. Small, but not zero, and Larsen’s sample probably wasn’t big enough to find it either way.
Grattan Institute reached a similar shape from a different direction. Adjusting for ICSEA, independent schools make about the same progress as government schools between Years 3 and 5, and between Years 7 and 9 they do “only very slightly better than government schools, less than one month of extra progress per year.”
So how do I square Marks on ATAR with everything else? The most likely explanation, and it’s the one the university research supports, is that high fee schools are very good at producing ATARs specifically. The ATAR is a high stakes, partly school assessed credential and schools pour resources into it. A real ATAR advantage and no real learning advantage can both be true at the same time, and the fact that those same students then underperform their ATAR at university is exactly what you’d expect if that’s what’s happening. But I’m reasoning there, not citing. Marks’s number is real and if you’re choosing a school to maximise an ATAR, it’s the finding that matters most to you.
The HSC looks different because league tables measure something else. In NSW, selective government schools dominate the very top of the 2025 rankings, with James Ruse leading the state on perfect ATARs, and independent schools fill much of the rest of the top 100. But a school ranking is mostly a readout of who enrolled, not what the school added. Selective public schools top those tables for exactly the same reason high fee independents do well on them, and neither result tells you what the school contributed.
Are private school teachers better than public school teachers?
There’s no good Australian evidence that they are. Teachers in both sectors hold the same qualifications and the same state registration, and they move between sectors throughout their careers.
What the evidence does show is that teacher quality is distributed unevenly by advantage rather than by sector. Save Our Schools’ analysis of PISA 2015 found Australia had the highest inequity in the OECD in how educational staff are allocated between advantaged and disadvantaged schools. That’s a public versus public problem as much as a public versus private one.
Glenn Fahey from the Centre for Independent Studies put it well talking to the ABC: “There are a lot more similarities between a local government school and a local non-government school, than there is between a government school in a less advantaged area and a government school in a highly advantaged area.”
How much do private school teachers get paid?
Generally more, but not by as much as people assume, and it comes with strings.
Public school pay is set by award and isn’t negotiable. In NSW, the current departmental scale starts graduates on $90,177 and tops out at $129,536 after seven steps, with another 3% due from October 2026. Head teachers and assistant principals are on $149,059 and principals on $229,435. Catholic and independent schools set their own enterprise agreements, which can sit above or below that. As The Conversation reported, NSW independent school teachers have been pushing for 5 to 7% above their public colleagues.
The catch is what the extra buys. Independent school teachers are typically expected to coach sport, run music groups, do weekend and evening events and handle heavy parent communication, and unlike NSW public schools there are often no specified limits on face to face teaching hours. The Independent Education Union has been pushing for workload standards and a right to disconnect alongside the pay claims.
What about peer groups, friendships and bullying?
This is the question I get asked most and it’s the one I expected to find nothing on. There’s actually decent data, and it’s the only place in this whole article where private schools come out ahead on a measure other than money.
PISA asks students about bullying and about their sense of belonging at school, and ACER reports the Australian results by sector. Sue Thomson’s summary in Teacher Magazine lays out the PISA 2018 numbers.
On bullying, Australia scores 0.33 against an OECD average of 0, so we have a bullying problem across the board. Within that, government schools scored 0.38 and both Catholic and independent schools scored 0.26. Every sector was significantly worse than the OECD average.
On sense of belonging, Australia sits at -0.19 against an OECD average of 0. Government schools were -0.27, Catholic and independent both -0.08. The individual items are easier to picture:
- Feel like an outsider or left out: 30% in government schools, 23% in Catholic and independent
- Feel awkward and out of place: 27% government, 22% Catholic and independent
- Feel lonely at school: 21% government, 17% Catholic and independent
Two things stop this being a clean win for private schools.
The first is that these numbers aren’t adjusted for socioeconomic background. Thomson adjusts the achievement scores for background and the sector gaps almost vanish. She doesn’t do the same adjustment for belonging and bullying, so we don’t know how much of that gap is the school and how much is the intake. Given what the adjustment does to every other measure in this article, I’d expect a fair chunk of it to be intake. Consider that an open question rather than a settled one.
The second is that all three sectors are getting worse, and at a similar rate. Between 2012 and 2018 the proportion of students who felt like an outsider rose 14 points in government schools, 11 in Catholic and 10 in independent. Whatever is going wrong with belonging in Australian schools, fees aren’t buying immunity from it.
Worth knowing for context: 41% of government schools are classed as disadvantaged, against 3% of Catholic schools and under 1% of independent schools. Going the other way, 63% of independent schools are classed as advantaged, against 31% of Catholic and 10% of government. So when people compare “the peer group” at two schools, most of what they’re comparing is family income.
On friendships specifically, as opposed to belonging and bullying, I couldn’t find Australian research comparing quality or durability of school friendships across sectors. If it exists I’d like to see it.
Does the old school tie actually help?
Around two-thirds of Australian chief executives went to private schools, which is the statistic the alumni network brochures lean on.
The evidence that the network itself does the work is weak. Jenny Chesters at Melbourne University’s Youth Research Centre told the ABC there’s no strong evidence linking private schooling to better career prospects, and that what matters is “not so much the type of school that you went to and the resources you have in those schools, it’s actually the quality or the level of education of the children attending that school.” She notes there’s plenty of anecdote about alumni networks landing jobs and very little tangible research.
Career management expert Libby Marshall made a point in the same piece that I hadn’t considered. An elite school on a CV cuts both ways depending on who’s reading it. “It’s also a discriminator and a blocker.”
Do private school kids do better at university?
No. They do worse, and this finding has been replicated since the 1980s.
Birch and Miller, in Australian Economic Papers in 2007, found a government school student with an entrance score of 85 did about as well in first year as a private school student who came in on 88. That is a three point gap. Five other Australian studies point the same way, and English research using A levels found about 7 percentage points more state school graduates getting an upper second or better.
Two honest caveats. All of those Australian studies use cohorts from 2000 to 2005 and most come from a single university. And the most recent replication, Li and Dockery in 2015 with around 8,400 students across 183 schools, found the effect is really about the school socioeconomic profile rather than whether it charges fees. Once they controlled for school resourcing, no sector came out ahead at all. What they did find is that students from higher SES schools score 1.5 to 1.7 percentage points lower in first year for the same ATAR, and that those schools “provide an inflation of ATAR scores that does not translate to improved academic performance at university.”
One finding here is bigger than the sector effect and gets far less attention. With the same entrance score, co-educational school graduates outperform single sex school graduates by about two percentage points. Birch and Miller found single sex status accounted for roughly two thirds of the apparent private school penalty. So a good chunk of what looks like a private school effect at university is actually a single sex school effect.
Why? Nobody knows for sure, and I want to be straight about that. The explanations on offer are informed guesses:
- High fee schools coach hard for the final exams, which lifts the ATAR above underlying ability, and students drift back towards that ability at uni.
- Heavy supervision and a narrow focus on the ATAR leaves students short on independent, self directed learning, which is exactly what university demands.
- Some private school graduates put in less effort at university because they believe the school name has already done the work.
Mike Dockery’s review of this literature notes the findings are “consistent with private schools either inflating their graduates’ ENTER scores given their ability or otherwise inflating their probability of entry to university given their ability.”
Do private school kids do better at life?
On the surface, clearly yes. Once you control for family background, mostly no.
The best Australian work here is Mike Dockery’s “Does Private Schooling Pay?” for the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education, using 14 years of HILDA data covering 17,826 people.
The raw gaps are big. Men who went to independent schools earn 12.9% more per hour than public school men, and women 16.6% more. Almost half of independent school students end up with a degree, against under one in five from government schools.
Then the controls go on. Adding parents’ occupational status knocks about 6 percentage points off the independent school premium. Adding the person’s own education level removes the rest. Dockery’s conclusion is that for independent schools, “any Independent school effect on wages is fully accounted for by the effect of school attended on the level of education attained.” With the full control set, the coefficient is 0.004 for men and statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Catholic schools are the odd one out. A wage premium of just over 3% survives every control Dockery applies, and he says plainly that it’s unclear why.
Two other findings are worth sitting with. Life satisfaction for independent school graduates is no higher than for public school graduates once you control for background. But independent school graduates end up living in neighbourhoods about 0.9 deciles higher on the socioeconomic index, and that one is not explained by family background or education. Something about the experience sorts people into more prestigious postcodes.
So the honest answer is that private school is strongly associated with a better life, and the mechanism is mostly that it gets more kids into university, and the kids who go were mostly going to get there anyway.
Is privilege bad at school? Is it bad to put all the wealthy kids together?
This is where I have to be careful, because the evidence is thinner and the temptation to fill the gap with opinion is high.
What we can measure is segregation, and Australia does badly. Save Our Schools’ analysis of OECD PISA data puts Australia equal fourth most segregated in the OECD, with 51% of disadvantaged students concentrated in disadvantaged schools, behind only Mexico, Hungary and Chile. Finland sits at 40%. Australia also had the equal largest increase in school social segregation in the OECD since 2006. Only 4.6% of our disadvantaged students attend advantaged schools, against an OECD average of 6.4%.
What we can also measure is that the mix matters. Research using PISA data finds that a school’s socioeconomic composition has a substantial effect on achievement, and that it works in roughly the same direction for students at every performance level. Kids in schools with heavy concentrations of low income peers do worse than comparable kids in mixed schools. The OECD’s Balancing School Choice and Equity report found that increasing choice and competition doesn’t lift overall system performance, and that greater isolation of high achievers is associated with lower scores among disadvantaged students.
What we can’t point to is solid Australian evidence that wealthy kids personally lose something by being educated only among other wealthy kids. It’s a reasonable hypothesis and I find it intuitively convincing, but intuition isn’t evidence and I’m not going to dress it up as such.
The closest thing to a data point is indirect. An ANU study using the Youth Electoral Study asked whether private schools produce more engaged citizens. At first glance they do, across voting commitment, political knowledge, activism and volunteering. Once family and school variables are controlled, most of those differences vanish. Independent school students retain higher political trust, which you can read either as civic health or as a comfortable relationship with institutions that have treated them well.
The other indirect signal is the university underperformance finding above. If elite schooling produced better prepared adults, you’d expect it to show up in first year results. It shows up in reverse.
Why are so many parents going private then?
Because the reasons mostly aren’t academic.
ABS figures for 2025 put 62.8% of students in government schools, 20.0% in Catholic and 17.2% in independent. Between 2021 and 2025, independent enrolments grew 15.3% and Catholic 5.7%, while government enrolments fell 0.4%. The shift is real and it’s accelerating.
The research on why points to values, discipline, tradition, facilities, safety and religion. Emma Rowe at Deakin and Christopher Lubienski studied this directly in a paper for the Journal of Education Policy called “Shopping for Schools or Shopping for Peers”, and the answer is largely peers. Wealthy families pick schools full of children from similar backgrounds. Education academic Paul Kidson told the ABC it reflects a middle class aspiration: “I want something different than what I’m getting at my local government school.”
None of those are unreasonable things to want. They’re just not the same thing as better academic results, which is what a lot of parents believe they’re buying.
Are private schools making local public schools worse?
Partly true. The strong version of the claim goes further than the evidence does.
The true part is the dynamic Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd documented in their Uneven Playing Field and Losing the Game reports for the Centre for Policy Development. Lower socioeconomic schools across all sectors lose their more advantaged students to schools perceived as better, which concentrates disadvantage in the schools left behind. Public schools now educate about 32% of students from low socio-educational backgrounds, against 14% in private schools, and around 80% of low SES, Indigenous and remote students. Jane Caro’s description of it on the ABC was blunt: “we are residualising in our public education system so that it becomes a kind of welfare system of last resort for the poor.”
Australia’s funding model makes this worse than it is elsewhere. In most OECD countries, private schools that take government money can’t charge tuition fees. Here they can charge whatever they like, which lets high fee schools select on wealth without having to be better at teaching. Emma Rowe’s analysis of OECD data found Australian households cover 21.4% of upper secondary education costs against an OECD average of 9%, and private sources cover 20% of primary against 10%. Only Hungary and Türkiye are higher. Finland is at 0.4%.
The part that isn’t established is the counterfactual. Nobody has run the experiment where every Australian family sends their kid to the local public school, so “everyone would be better off” is a projection rather than a finding. The evidence supports the weaker and still significant claim: segregating students by advantage clearly harms the disadvantaged ones, doesn’t improve the system overall, and the top students appear to do fine either way.
What else gets argued about?
A few other questions come up constantly in this debate. Here’s where each one sits, including the ones I can’t answer properly.
Single sex or co-ed? The university research covers this. With the same tertiary entrance score, co-educational school graduates outperform single sex school graduates at university. That’s one measure out of many and I wouldn’t build a decision on it alone.
Do private school kids finish school and get to university more often? Yes on both counts in the raw numbers. Marks and colleagues found private school students were substantially more likely to attend university. But Cardak and Ryan reanalysed the same data controlling for socioeconomic background and either entrance score or early achievement, and found no significant sector effect on the likelihood of going to university. Their conclusion was that the gap is already set by Year 9.
Class sizes and facilities. Independent schools have about $8,300 more per student per year to spend, and it goes somewhere. I couldn’t find a clean national comparison of class size by sector that accounts for school size and location, so I’m not going to put a number on it.
Discipline and classroom climate. PISA asks principals whether teacher behaviours hinder student learning. The index was 0.42 for government schools, 0.31 for Catholic and 0.02 for independent, where higher is worse. Again, not adjusted for the schools’ intake.
What about selective public schools? They complicate the whole debate, because they sit outside the public and private framing entirely. They top the NSW HSC tables, they’re free, and they concentrate high achievers as aggressively as any high fee school does. Emma Rowe has written about them turbo-charging inequity through voluntary fees and selection. That’s a whole separate article.
Enrolment and exclusion practices. Private schools in Australia can decline or remove students in ways public schools can’t, and public schools have to take everyone. This is a real structural difference and it drives a lot of the composition gaps above. I haven’t found good national data quantifying it.
Religious education. Roughly a third of Australian students attend a faith based school. Whether that’s a benefit is not a question evidence can settle for you.
So what would I do?
If you are buying learning, the evidence says you are mostly buying something you would get anyway. No NAPLAN advantage once background is accounted for, no independent school wage advantage once background and education level are accounted for, and private school graduates underperform their own entrance scores at university.
If you are buying an ATAR specifically, that is a different question and the Victorian population data says you probably are getting something, worth several ranks. Whether several ATAR ranks is worth a few hundred thousand dollars depends on how tight the cutoff is for whatever your kid wants to do.
If you’re buying facilities, a particular religious upbringing, a specific music or sport program, a family tradition, or a particular peer group, then you’re buying something real and the evidence has nothing to say about whether it’s worth $369,594 to you. That’s your call.
The strongest case for private school in all of this is the belonging and bullying data, and it’s the one finding nobody has properly tested against family background. If you’re weighing this up for a kid who’s struggling socially, that’s the number I’d want to see adjusted, and I’d want to look at the two specific schools rather than the sector averages.
The thing I keep coming back to is the switcher finding. Those kids were already top of the class at their public primary school. The school didn’t make them. They made the school’s average.
What do you reckon? I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’s been through both.
