In her new book Rich Kid Poor Kid, Jane Caro tables a radical political compromise that has the potential to address the most urgent problems facing Australian schools while also accommodating diverse perspectives about the nature of education, including the role of faith. The proposed model — which is employed in the Canadian province of Ontario — allows for the full public funding of non-government schools, accompanied by mechanisms that ensure they can maintain their distinctive ethos, character and curriculum. The quid pro quo for full funding is that the faith-based public schools cannot charge fees or selectively enrol students on the basis of academic aptitude or previous engagement with schooling.
In his response to Caro’s book, David Hastie mentions in passing the “Ontario solution” before dismissing it as belonging to “an age-old narrative in Australia” in which “state schools are the norm, the core of egalitarian society, while private schools are the aberration”. But this misrepresents what is genuinely new about both Ontario’s arrangements and the shift Caro is proposing for the way we think about Australia’s school system.
Hastie’s lack of curiosity is unfortunate because a closer inspection reveals that the Ontario model incorporates the choice and local governance he values without producing the inequality and social segregation we should all abhor.
What I saw in Ottawa
In late 2024, I joined a group of Australian educators on a study tour of Canada. One morning we visited Notre Dame High School, about fifteen minutes’ drive from the Canadian parliament in urban Ottawa. Notre Dame is as Catholic as any Australian Catholic school. It has a focus on faith formation, there is prayer every morning and students attend mass. The Religious Studies curriculum has been designed by the Ontario Bishops’ Council, but the principal expressed to us his belief that “every lesson is a religion lesson”. The school is governed by a Board of Trustees elected by local Catholic ratepayers, who themselves must be Catholic
Notre Dame High is also a public school: it is fully publicly funded and free. Students living within the catchment zone from Catholic families have a right to attend. The school serves one of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the city, enrolling twice as many students from low-income families as the Ontario average. For this reason, it receives significant additional funding from the provincial government.
Notre Dame is just one of two thousand faith-based public schools that serve a third of Ontario’s student population. Because faith-based schools are fee-free and enrol on an inclusive basis, the socio-economic profile of their students is essentially identical to the secular schools. As Chris Bonnor and I reported in Lessons From Canada, Ontario’s schools are much more socially mixed than Australia’s and concentrations of social disadvantage are less pronounced.
Australia’s segregated education system
In 2024, Education Minister Jason Clare acknowledged that Australia has “one of the most segregated education systems in the world”, and the problem is getting worse. Last year, Michele Bruniges, the former Secretary of the federal Department of Education, said that in 2017 there were 1,281 schools where the majority of students were from the most disadvantaged quarter of the population. By 2023 that figure had jumped to 1,565 schools, an increase of 284 schools. This is significantly, though not exclusively, driven by the differences between the government and non-government sectors. In its 2026 Report on Government Services, the Productivity Commission identified that students with low Socio-Educational Advantage (SEA) status make up just 13.7 per cent of students in non-government schools; in public schools that proportion is 31.5 per cent.
Social segregation has a direct and profoundly harmful effect on student learning. This was the clear and unambiguous advice of the independent expert panel assembled by Minister Clare before the last funding negotiations. It is notable in this respect that Ontario, with its more socio-economically diverse system, has outperformed Australia in every area of the PISA test since its inception.
One reason for the social make-up of local schools is residential variation. But that doesn’t explain why social segregation is so much more pronounced in Australia than in comparable countries, nor does it address how the problem has worsened over time. The real culprit is not where we live but the workings of the education market. The fundamental driver of this deepening divide is a system of unregulated fees that have consistently outpaced inflation throughout this century.
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As Jane Caro highlights in her book, private school fees are now one of the major causes of bankruptcy in this country. Given current policy settings, what else would we expect? As Caro writes, “the public subsidy of private supply is almost always inflationary, unless you cap the prices the private supplier can charge”.
There is another consequence of prohibitively expensive school fees — one that advocates of non-government education in Australia rarely attend to. Religious schools effectively exclude the poor religious. “Catholic schools are not educating most of our poor”, the late Cardinal George Pell frankly observed. “Even though we think our school fees are relatively low, for many [parents] increasingly they are too high”, Brian Croke, the former director of NSW Catholic Education, once acknowledged.
“Choice” in Australia is only available to those who can pay. To point this obvious fact out is not an attempt to cast aspersions on the intentions of non-government school leaders and educators, or to deny the sincere attempts of many schools to be as accessible as possible. The distribution of students across our schools is not simply a matter of individual choices, as Hastie contends, but about Australia’s unusual approach to funding and regulating schools.
There is an alternative
In Rich Kid Poor Kid, Kane Caro subjects these policy settings to searing scrutiny and asks whether we are willing do things better. She forces us to question whether it make sense to use public subsidies to give non-government schools significant advantages in total income per student — especially when the better resourced schools enrol a more privileged section of the population? Caro invites us to ask whether Ontario’s example of needs-based funding, equally applied to all schools, might make more sense? Is this a better model of providing choice that is real and accessible for all, and in a way that also promotes excellence and equity?
None of these questions presuppose that Ontario is a perfect education system. One obvious deficiency is that, due to a quirk of history, full public funding is only enjoyed by Catholic schools and does not extend to other denominations and religions. But when we look around the world to comparable countries like the UK, New Zealand and the Netherlands, we find many other examples of fully publicly funded faith-based schools from which we could learn if we choose. All provide examples of how diverse schools with distinct missions and educational philosophies can prosper on a foundation of common resourcing and regulation.
In exhibiting little curiosity about Ontario or other alternatives, David Hastie is by no means alone. Our system of providing extensive public subsidies to schools that can set fees as they wish, and enrol and expel whom they like, is almost unique internationally. But as much as global observers are often aghast when they learn about our arrangements, Australians tend to take them for granted. It’s as though there is no other alternative.
Jane Caro has done us a great service in showing us that there is an alternative. Anybody who cares about education and equity in this country — and our society’s commitment to its most vulnerable members — should consider it carefully.
Tom Greenwell is co-author with Chris Bonnor of Waiting for Gonski: How Australia Failed its Schools, “Choice and Fairness: A Common Framework for All Australian Schools” and “Lessons from Canada: An Equal School System is Possible”.