The spatiality of economic maldistribution in public-school funding in Australia: still a poisonous debate

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the composition, distribution, and history of school funding in Australia through a spatial lens (Soja 2010). We explore multi-scalar school funding policy through three layers of economic maldistribution. We sketch the funding disparities between the three school sectors (public, Catholic, and independent) exposing a spatial injustice in policies of school choice; the spatial and economic maldistribution between state jurisdictions; and the economic maldistribution within state public systems, including the ability of their school communities to contribute funds. Spatial injustice is uncovered in economic maldistribution within and across these policy layers, adding nuance to existing school funding debates. The Australian case is relevant to international explorations of school funding as an example of ‘unjust practice’ in the hierarchies between schools across sectors, between jurisdictions, and within systems of public education.

KEYWORDS:

• School funding
• public schools
• Australia
• economic maldistribution‌
• spatial justice
• Edward Soja

Introduction

Since the 1970s, the discourse around the funding of schools in Australia has been described as ‘the oldest, deepest, most poisonous debate’ (Freudenberg 2009, 28).¹ This description was related to the public funding of non-government schooling and remains current because Australia ranks in the bottom third of wealthy countries for equality in education (Chzhen et al. 2018). It is now one of the highest-spending advanced economies in the OECD in funding the non-government education sector (Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD) 2018). Spending on private schools has increased five times that of public schools (Cobbold 2022), and, as we explore below, this contributes to the residualising of public schools.

In Australia, 65.6% of students attend public schools (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) 2021a, 2021b), much lower than the OECD average of 82% (Koinzer, Nikolai, and Waldow 2017; OECD 2020). However, these public schools disproportionately educate the majority of students from equity backgrounds, including 83.7% of Indigenous students (ACARA 2021a), the majority of the 1.2 million children living in poverty in Australia (The Smith Family 2021), and 75% of children with a disability (Hunter 2019). In the years, since Freudenberg’s observation, there has been increasing complexity in school funding, with the resources divide between the public, Catholic, and independent sectors (including small and elite faith-based schools) increasingly disadvantaging public schools (Bonner and Shepherd 2017). This has led to increased inequity, diminishing academic and social outcomes, and entrenched social stratification. As Cobbold (2020, 1) notes in his analysis of 2018 PISA results, ‘disadvantaged students in Australia are being denied equal opportunities to learn because they face far more shortages of teachers and material resources than advantaged students’.

In this paper, we draw on geographical and spatial metaphors to examine the complex landscape of school funding in Australia to explore and theorise spatial injustices (Koinzer, Nikolai, and Waldow 2017), uncovering the multi-scalar spatial effects of school funding policy. Examining the accumulation of policy leading to maldistribution matters because it is public school systems that work the hardest to educate those with the least financial capital, and undervalued social and cultural capitals. Drawing on theories of spatial justice, we explore the composition, distribution, and history of three aspects of the current policy landscape of school funding and we signal the spatial implications for social justice. We highlight (1) the funding disparities between the three school sectors (public, Catholic, and independent) exposing a spatial injustice in policies of school choice, (2) the spatial and economic maldistribution between state jurisdictions through the abilities of different jurisdictions, together with the Australian federal government, to fund education, and (3) the economic maldistribution within state public systems highlighting disparities between public schools depending on their spatial and contextual attributes, including the ability of their school communities to contribute funds.

Australia has distinct state education systems and while the constitutional responsibility for education lies with the states, the cost of these responsibilities may not correspond with their ability to raise revenue. This means that the federal government, through income tax revenue, makes individually negotiated payments to states to assist in funding their responsibilities, giving them the means to exert ‘policy influence’ over state responsibilities (Fenna 2008, 509). Federal intervention in state education has increased considerably in the past decade encompassing both policy influence and policy implementation (Savage, Di Gregorio, and Lingard 2022). Federal and state governments therefore share the funding of three sectors of schooling (government, or public schools, and non-government, comprising the Catholic system and other independent, or private, schools). Australia’s school funding has been described as ‘international worst practice’:

three sectors, each funded in different ways from three different sources; two levels of government involved, one with the responsibility, the other with the money; some schools charging fees, others free (well, nominally anyway); some schools (including some government schools) selecting or ejecting students on academic and/or financial and/or religious grounds, others required by law to take all comers. These arrangements are international worst practice, a recipe for gaming the system and for conflict. (Ashenden 2016, no page number).

There is a high degree of educational inequality in Australia, and contentious increased government funding of non-government schools coupled with the falling educational performance of Australia in global rankings provides a warrant for an examination of the maldistribution of economic resources available to sectors, states, and schools.

The first layer of policy we explore in this paper is the aforementioned ‘poisonous debate’ of government spending on the three sectors of schooling: public, Catholic, and independent schools. Significant taxpayer funds are spent on private schooling in Australia, with family investment in education one of the highest in the OECD, leading to questions of what constitutes the ‘public’ in education (Gerrard, Savage, and O'Connor 2017; Hogan and Thompson 2021). For the purposes of this paper, we take up the funding policy story from the 1960s when there was a major policy shift in the funding of non-government schools. A crisis in Catholic education in the 1960s led to the direct federal government funding for religious schools and set a precedent for federal intervention in state education policy (Campbell and Proctor 2014). These interventions expanded in the 1970s (MacDonald et al. 2021). The Karmel report (1973) argued for funding based on need and represents the first significant policy attempt to address educational disadvantage, aiming to provide a quality education for all students in Australia. As a result of this intervention, needs-based funding went to under-resourced Catholic schools but ultimately led to the federal funding of other non-government schools (Forsey, Proctor, and Stacey 2017; Rudkin 2005). This reinforced, as a principle, a public expectation of public funding for all non-government schools (Forsey, Proctor, and Stacey 2017). When combined with the policies of choice and competition, entrenched in the 1990s, this has fuelled notions of an expectation of the government funding of a parental right to choose to educate their children in non-government schools. As a result, the non-government school sectors have become a powerful political force (Gurd 2013). Over the last 50 years, there have been numerous attempts to ‘level the playing field’ for students through needs-based funding yet these have not halted the segregation and residualising of public schooling, nor the declining results of Australia in the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) (Greenwell and Bonnor 2022). In exploring this layer of maldistribution, we sketch the funding disparities between the different school sectors, along with their federal, state, and parental investments, and argue that together with policies of school choice, issues of spatial justice, based on access to school choice, are exposed.

A second layer of policy is the economic maldistribution between state jurisdictions which allocate different levels of funding to their individual state education systems, as well as contributing to non-government schools. Spatial variations in expenditure between states are highlighted, which includes negotiated federal contributions. These are political decisions that have uneven spatial consequences. We sketch the current funding arrangements across state jurisdictions along with federal interventions, which show disparity across state borders. A third layer of maldistribution lies within state public systems where we explore the growing disparities between public schools depending on their contextual attributes, and their ability to raise funds through parental and philanthropic contributions. Together these layers contribute to the formation of the landscape of school funding policy in Australia and the issues of spatial justice we explore in this paper.

In the following sections, we explain our use of the critical geography of Edward Soja to leverage spatial justice as a lens through which to expose the extent of spatially expressed economic maldistribution within Australian education. Following this, we outline three conditions of maldistribution: between sectors, between state jurisdictions, and within state public education systems. We draw on financial reporting from ACARA (ACARA 2021a, 2021b), the Report on Government Services (Productivity Commission 2021), the government MySchool website which collates detailed information about all schools in Australia, individual school websites (www.myschool.edu.au), and the reports to the community from individual schools.

Spatial justice

Given the challenge of Australia’s size and population distribution, spatial justice is a significant issue across the three conditions of economic maldistribution canvassed in this paper: between sectors, and between and within state jurisdictions. We draw on critical geographer Edward Soja’s (2010) theorising of spatial justice to explore this maldistribution. Soja (2010, 1) argued that however justice is defined, it has a ‘consequential geography, a spatial expression that is more than just a background reflection or set of physical attributes to be mapped’. He argues that there is a ‘triple dialectic’ of ‘ontological qualities of human existence, from which all knowledge follows: the social/societal, the temporal/historical, and the spatial/geographical’ (Soja 2010, 70). The spatial/geographical is often considered to be relatively static, whereas time and sociality have been seen as dynamic. Soja argued that we are ‘enmeshed in efforts to shape the spaces in which we live while at the same time these established and evolving spaces are shaping our lives in many different ways’ (2010, 71).

His argument that human spatiality is socially produced invites examination of how power is exercised requiring:

a different form of spatial consciousness, a way of thinking that recognize[s] that space is filled with politics and privileges, ideologies and cultural collisions, utopian ideals and dystopian oppression, justice and injustice, oppressive power and the possibility for emancipation. (2010, p. 103)

Soja contended that the sidelining of the spatial in the triple dialectic necessitates ‘an assertive spatial perspective’ (Soja 2010, 2), without privileging it above sociality and historicality. The inclusion of spatiality together with socio-historical dimensions allows theorisation of spatial justice that accounts for unequal development across geographical areas and the inequalities that arise as a consequence (Soja 2010). The spatial nature of such inequalities becomes clear in canvassing the history of schooling in Australia. Soja asserts that such inequalities in the geographies we produce, socially and politically, must always arise because such developments do not happen evenly, but that the inclusion of spatiality works towards ‘achieving greater justice … [and] becomes more encompassing, inclusive and feasible than achieving full equality’ (Soja 2010, 23). Justice is the mobilising concept, provoking new ‘modes of thinking about the spatiality of (in)justice and the (in)justice of spatiality’ (Soja 2010, 13). Spatiality of injustice emphasises the spatial dimension of justice including how ‘various forms of injustice manifest in space’, while the injustice of spatiality shifts focus ‘to structural dynamics that produce and reproduce injustice through space’ (Dikeç 2009, p. 1).

Soja’s theorising of spatial justice was initially focussed around urbanicity, specifically the Los Angeles megacity but he suggested that the ‘rural milieu cannot be divorced from the urban system which is embedded in it’ (Soja 1969, 284). This has resonance in Australia as one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Eighty percent of the population live in major cities (less than 1% of the landmass), with another 10% in the urban fringe of these cities, predominantly along the eastern seaboard (Daley, Wood, and Chivers 2017). The remaining 10% live in more sparsely populated areas that cover the interior (7.7 million km²) in regional, rural, and remote areas serviced by the urban coastal fringe. Australia’s unique geography and colonial histories, which are expressed politically and spatially as different state jurisdictions, present a significant challenge for sustaining equitable education systems related to both the country’s centralised urbanicity and the nature of urban, regional, rural, and remote communities. The challenges of low population density across vast geographical areas are also coupled with challenges in the spatial expression of advantage and disadvantage within metropolitan and regional communities, as well as the consequential geographies of the political expression of space, such as through state boundaries.

Educational research exploring space, and place – that is ‘space which has meaning for its users’ (Temple 2018, 136) – has occurred at a range of scales: from the examination of learning spaces (Blackmore and O’Mara 2022) to the pedagogies of place (Somerville 2007). Issues of spatial justice in education, the focus of this paper, have had a focus on inclusion, access, and curriculum. Macrander (2015), for example, conducted a socio-spatial analysis revealing unequal access for Black African student participation in tertiary education. Stewart et al. (2021) explore the impacts of the de-zoning of schools in a climate of competition and choice in Aotearoa New Zealand with dire implications for the spatially expressed racial segregation of schools. In curriculum development and place-based pedagogies, there has been an argument for incorporating local knowledges, both in rural communities, i.e. incorporating farming knowledge and practices (Shannon 2017), and in urban areas, i.e. contributing to the local community through school projects (Tolman 2021).

Concerns for spatial justice have been critical to rural education research both in Australia and in other global contexts, particularly in the ways that opportunity and access are unequally distributed, leading to different educational outcomes for students. The research of Beach and colleagues (2018) in Nordic countries highlights three key insights in relation to communities that experience locational disadvantage (both rural and urban): people can be ‘stigmatised, blamed for their problematic conditions and treated differently to people in other areas’, their knowledge can be viewed through a lens of ‘cultural deficiency’, which then contributes to the ‘hollowing out’ of material support of such communities (Beach et al. 2018, p. 13). In Australia, these issues have long been the concern of rural education researchers (Chesters and Cuervo 2022; Cuervo 2016; Roberts and Cuervo 2015), who contend that there has been a geographical blindness (Green and Letts 2007) to the ‘particularities of (rural) places’ (Roberts and Green 2013, p. 765). Roberts and Fuqua (2021) argue that the spatiality that is produced by the urbanicity of Australia has contributed to urban-normative policy in education that does not account for the needs of rural and remote students (Roberts and Fuqua 2021). The observations of Beach et al. (2018) have equal relevance in explorations of the distribution of advantage and disadvantage in urban areas. The stigmatism, deficit views and declining material support, such as the ‘hollowing out’ of social welfare support, is evident in any number of suburbs in Australian cities and regions.

What is clear in any discussion about schools and education is the importance of context. The consequential geographies of educating Australian children, across state jurisdictions and in disparate rural, regional, and urban communities, highlight both the spatialities of injustice and the injustice of spatiality. The contextual details of individual schools, and their spatial location has implications for their ability to provide quality educational programmes, access resources (economic, material, and human), and exercise autonomy (Keddie et al. 2020; Keddie et al. 2022). And, as rural education researchers have argued, schools are disadvantaged by structural urban-normative policies as a result of their rural, remote and regional locations. A focus on spatiality is critical in understanding the context of schools and their ability to provide socially just outcomes for students. Despite many policy attempts over many years to account for the uniqueness of schools and their communities and to forge equitable education systems, there is a developing pattern of residualisation of some government schools. This pattern was exacerbated by Prime Minister John Howard’s statement that public education was a ‘safety net’ for ‘a reasonable quality education’ (Armitage 2007, 21) for those that cannot afford private schools (Reid 2015). Leaving aside the argument for education as a public good, Howard’s argument for the public schooling offering ‘a reasonable quality of education’ suggested parents had a ‘choice’ to send their child to a private school. As it did then, this remains not just an issue of affordability, but of access, in that across vast swathes of the country no such ‘choice’ exists (explored below). Inequality is rising in Australia, despite the sustained economic growth we have experienced (Davidson, Bradbury, and Wong 2020), leading to entrenched (deep and persistent) disadvantage and eroding social cohesion which negatively impacts the educational futures of children. Getting education funding right to ameliorate these effects should be a critical role of government. Australian governments spent $65.5 billion dollars in 2018–19 on primary and secondary schools which is 2.8% of the Gross Domestic Product which has varied minimally since 1992 (ACARA 2021b). The way this funding is distributed, however, across sectors, between states, and within state systems have changed markedly.

In the following section, we turn to briefly introduce the needs-based funding model that is currently in place, before turning to map three layers of maldistribution: between sectors, across states, and within state systems.

Australian school funding: the Student Resource Package (SRS)

Current school funding in Australia is based on the SRS comprising differential per student funding for primary and secondary students, as well as a number of loadings for school- and student-based disadvantage, such as school size and location, socio-economic indicators, Indigeneity, disability, and English language proficiency and background (Gonski et al. 2011). The SRS is calculated based on resourcing levels benchmarked from a selection of reference schools where 80% of students achieved above the minimum standard on the narrow measures of NAPLAN literacy and numeracy. The 2020 SRS was $11,747 for primary students and $14,761 for secondary students (Department of Education Skills and Employment 2020) and additional equity loadings are allocated either directly to schools in the independent sector, the Catholic sector, and state jurisdictions for disbursement according to state and Catholic sector arrangements.

The 2019 state and federal recurrent funding per student is indicated in Table 1. These figures exclude the capital grants spending available from federal funding to non-government schools but include the user cost of capital and capital depreciation for government schools which allows state jurisdictions to reduce their cash allocation to the SRS for schools (Rorris 2020). This renders comparisons between state and federal government actual funding difficult. This funding reflects the system spending per student, not the money schools receive for their students.

Table 1. 2019 Real government recurrent expenditure (AUD) on government and non-government schools per full time equivalent (FTE) student (excluding capital grants) (Productivity Commission 2021).

	Australian Capital territory (ACT)	New South Wales (NSW)	Northern Australia (NT)	Queensland (Qld)	South Australia (SA)	Tasmania (Tas)	Victoria (Vic)	Western Australia (WA)	Australia
Government Schools
Federal expenditure	2,465	3,036	7,382	3,146	2,993	3,542	2,840	2,634	3,017
State expenditure	19,673	17,399	19,213	15,608	16,001	15,975	15,134	16,652	16,312
Total government school expenditure	22,137^3	20,436	26,595	18,754	18,994	19,517	17,974	19,286	19,328
Non-Government Schools
Federal expenditure	8,112	8,759	15,663	9,296	9,218	10,550	8,834	8,864	9,005
State expenditure	2,559	2,972	6,001	3,011	2,486	3,261	2,124	3,607	2,808
Total non-government school expenditure	10,671	11,731	21,663	12,307	11,704	13,810	10,958	12,471	11,813

The table illustrates the different responsibilities of state and federal governments in funding government and non-government schools, highlighting the variability across sectors and state jurisdictions. For government school students, the state was responsible for funding 84% and the federal government 16%. Whereas for non-government students, the states contributed 24%, and the federal government 76%.

Economic maldistribution

The complexity of Australia’s spend on schooling is explored in the following sections. The first section explores the distribution of public funds across the three sectors of schooling: public, Catholic, and independent. Independent schools comprise elite through to ‘low cost’ private schools including a range of religious schools, Indigenous community schools, schools with particular educational philosophies such as Steiner or Montessori, for students with disabilities, or second chance alternative settings (Independent Schools Australia 2020). The second section explores distribution across state jurisdictions, and the third explores distribution within state systems related to the ability of parents to contribute additional funding to their children’s schooling.

Sector maldistribution

An analysis of Australian education in the 1950s voiced early concern about the impact of the Catholic and independent sectors of schooling on the public sector (Butts 1955). There has always been a market for these schools in Australia but a strong privatisation agenda was embedded during the late 1990s and early 2000s by conservative federal governments (Aulich and O'Flynn 2007), who increased funding of private schools on both free market and Christian ideological grounds. The policies were rooted in arguments for small government, private providers, and consumer choice, leading to a sustained growth in the number of independent schools and the flight of middle-class children from the public to the independent sector (Aulich and O'Flynn 2007). This has entrenched competition between sectors, leading to a system recognised as one of the most stratified in the OECD (Chzhen et al. 2018).

In 2020, there were 4,006,974 students attending school in Australia (ACARA 2021a). A total of 65.6% of students were enrolled in government schools, 19.4% in Catholic schools, and 15% in independent schools (ACARA 2021a). There is variation in sector enrolments between states (Table 2), reflecting the historical development of schooling in those jurisdictions. This has implications for state jurisdiction funding arrangements, such as the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) having nearly 40% of its student population in Catholic or private schools. These figures also indicate which jurisdictions have a greater range of schools on offer in order for families to exercise ‘choice’. The ACT, for example, is a small territory encompassing Australia’s capital city Canberra which has the highest median income and the highest percentage post-graduate education in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021), and therefore, perhaps, the most lucrative market for a range of public, Catholic and independent schools.

Table 2. Number and percentage of enrolled students by sector and state in 2020 (ACARA 2021a).

	Government		Catholic		Independent		Total Students	% of Australian students
	Students	%	Students	%	Students	%
ACT	45,647	61.5	18,179	24.5	10,403	14.0	74,229	1.9
NSW	810,705	65.3	257,082	20.7	174,175	14.0	1,241,962	31.0
NT	30,411	74.5	4,794	11.7	5,604	13.7	40,809	1.0
QLD	573,923	66.9	153,766	17.9	130,231	15.2	857,920	21.4
SA	177,038	64.7	46,432	17.0	50,266	18.4	273,736	6.8
Tas	56,973	69.5	15,052	18.4	9,990	12.2	82,015	2.0
Vic	644,475	64.0	210,998	21.0	150,999	15.0	1,006,472	25.1
WA	289,971	67.5	72,302	16.8	67,558	15.7	429,831	10.7
Australia	2,629,143	65.6	778,605	19.4	599,226	15.0	4,006,974	100

In the following table (Table 3), the 2019 gross income available per student in each sector and state is outlined. Independent and Catholic schools can allocate some of this income to current and future capital projects thus offsetting their income, just as they are able to access capital grants funding through the Federal Government (not available to government schools). Government schools are not able to use their income in this way.

Table 3. 2019 Total gross income (AUD) per FTE student by sector and state (all school levels). These figures include state and federal recurrent funding, grants, fees and charges, and income from private sources (ACARA 2021b).

States	Government	Catholic	Independent
ACT	16,217	17,328	22,729
NSW	15,881	16,058	25,368
NT	23,099	25,520	25,040
QLD	15,346	17,712	21,185
SA	15,730	18,268	21,256
Tas	16,499	19,243	23,171
Vic	14,416	17,123	25,944
WA	16,031	17,638	22,613
Australia	15,520	17,152	23,956

These figures indicate the disparities in funding between sectors, and importantly, what access to income each sector can rely on to educate their students over and above the SRS (outlined above). These disparities are the difference in the quality of resources and facilities available to students (Reid 2020, 69). In each state, government schools have the lowest income available (Table 3). Independent schools have access to funding substantially above the SRS, which includes parental fees, recurrent public funding from state and federal governments (Table 1) as well as access to a further allocation in capital grants (Rorris 2020). Internal complexity across and within sectors are concealed by these figures. For example, the compensatory equity loadings based on student and school characteristics, such as school location in very remote areas, vary significantly across all schools in each sector.

An exclusive focus on the equitable distribution of funding for the most disadvantaged students can lead to ‘turn[ing] our eyes away from the education of the privileged’ (Connell 2002, 34). Here, we bring a focus on the funding of the independent school sector. While there are ‘low fee’ independent schools, some elite independent school fees reach up to $42,500/year per student in Victoria (the highest private school fees in Australia), with these schools also receiving substantial public funds. In other states, the highest fees for elite independent schools range from $41,090/year (NSW), $28,992/year (WA), $27,900/year (SA), $28,230 (Qld), $26,395 (ACT), and $20,420 (Tas). As well as generating these parental fees, these seven highest fee-independent schools, educating 8,874 students (0.2% of the Australian student population) (myschool.com.au), received more than 50 million dollars in recurrent government funding ($36,509,436 from the federal government, and $13,816,820 from state governments), as well as having access to capital grants funding. Under conditions of market competition, this kind of access to funding has fed an ‘arms race’ for facilities in elite independent schools to attract students. Public monies have been spent in these schools contributing to the construction of orchestra pits, wellness centres, auditoriums, playing fields, etc. As a further example, Australia’s four wealthiest schools (educating 13,630 students) between 2013 and 2017 together spent $402 million in capital expenditure, some of which is public money, while the poorest 1,800 schools, educating 107,000 students spent less than $370 million (Ting, Palmer, and Scott 2019).

The differential effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the three sectors of schooling reinforce, and entrench, the stark disparities illustrated above (Eacott et al. 2020). Students from equity backgrounds during the pandemic are at risk of falling further behind through lack of access to adequate services and support (OECD 2020), the digital divide (Eacott et al. 2020), and a sense of belonging (Longmuir 2021). But independent schools were able to gain an advantage unavailable to government schools by accessing the federal government Jobseeker Payments, a payment to assist businesses and not-for-profits to keep staff in work if their turnover had been reduced substantially during lockdowns. Despite not seeing significant falls in fee collection, independent schools claimed these payments with some schools receiving up to $18 million and shifting some of this public money into their scholarship funds (Davies 2021).

The proliferation of market and school choice narratives and the increasing spending on non-government schools raises issues of who can exercise choice, not just based on the ability of families to pay for that choice, but also because of the spatial distribution of schooling. While Catholic primary schools can be found in many rural and remote towns across Australia, notionally offering a choice between a government and Catholic school at the primary level, other independent schools are primarily found within the urban fringe of major cities and in some regional centres (Table 4). All but 29 of 925 independent schools in Australia are located within cities or major regional areas (Table 4). The remote and very remote independent schools are predominantly community Indigenous schools. This exposes a stark spatial expression of uneven access to choice for parents, who, according to the goals for education should be able to ‘make informed choices’ for their children in terms of schooling (Education Council 2019).

Table 4. Distribution of independent schools by location (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority 2021a).

	Major cities	Inner regional	Outer regional	Remote	Very remote	Total
ACT	14					14
NSW	216	85	17		1	319
NT			5	5	5	15
QLD	111	47	31	2		191
SA	59	18	9	1	1	88
Tas		21	7			28
Vic	100	32	13			145
WA	87	13	11	3	11	125
Australia	587	216	93	11	18	925

While rural education researchers have long argued that education policy essentialises metropolitan areas as the norm (Roberts and Fuqua 2021), here we argue that the notion of parental choice is largely an urban-normative concept and is an example of spatial injustice, highlighting both the spatiality of injustice, i.e. how injustice manifests in space and the injustice of spatiality, i.e. how ‘structural dynamics … produce and reproduce injustice through space’ (Dikeç 2009, p. 1). The key spatial observation here is that government spending of public monies on non-government schools benefits those who have access to those schools at the expense of those who do not.

Maldistribution between state jurisdictions

The Gonski review of funding noted that Australian states and territories have different capacities to adequately fund schooling (Gonski et al. 2011). The different capacities of state jurisdictions to fund public schooling are illustrated in Tables 1 and 3. These funding regimes represent not only political choices in determining where funds are expended, but also the different consequential geographies (Soja 2010) of these jurisdictions and the resultant equity funding that schools in these states accrue. For example, the NT, WA, Queensland, and NSW have significant numbers of remote, rural, and outer regional schools (1211 schools) requiring additional funding in an attempt to ameliorate the effects of locational impacts on children’s education as indicated in their higher levels of funding per student (ACARA 2021a).

The Gonski equity loadings were designed to account for state capacities to fund the range of schools in their jurisdictions. However, because the loadings have shifted substantially and each state allocates equity funding using different mechanisms, schools in similar circumstances, separated by a state border can receive significantly different funding and have different access to systemic supports. To illustrate, public School A in Victoria, in 2019 received $14,710 in government funding per student ($3,012 from the federal government and $11,698 from the Victorian government). Eight kilometres away, across the Victorian-NSW border, public School B received $20,067 per student ($4,354 from the federal government, and $15,713 from NSW government) (www.myschool.gov.au). Both schools share a similar profile with the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA)² values below 930, potentially with the same needs for equity funding including being small schools with Indigenous and Language Background Other than English students. This is a significant economic disparity between these two similar schools separated by a political state boundary where each state negotiates for federal financial support to assist in maintaining separate education systems. This highlights how political shapes consequential geographies and produces spatial economic injustices.

Additionally, despite the enduring belief in Australia that public education is ‘free’, increasingly parents are expected to contribute payments to make up the shortfall from state education departments. Table 5 illustrates the per student parent contributions by state and sector, again highlighting disparities between state jurisdictions. In public schools, these are usually described as ‘voluntary’ contributions. In Victoria, for example, they are considered a necessary contribution ‘enhancing and enriching the educational experience … [allowing] schools to offer enhanced programmes and opportunities which their school communities expect them to offer’ (Victoria State Government 2020, 1). Parent contributions to the Catholic and independent sectors are also illustrated. Victorian families make the largest contributions to public education, while Victorian schools receive the lowest state and federal government funding across Australia (Table 1 and 3).

Table 5. 2019 income from fees, charges, and parent contributions (AUD) by sector and state, $ per FTE student (ACARA 2021b).

States	Government	Catholic	Independent
ACT	477	4,114	13,052
NSW	399	2,896	13,061
NT	214	2,717	5,708
QLD	413	4,348	9,003
SA	645	5,085	9,011
Tas	361	2,979	9,343
Vic	711	4,420	15,135
WA	357	4,556	10,022
Australia	488	3,958	11,980

These figures, along with the figures in Tables 1 and 3, show the consequential geographies of the expenditure for educating children in the different state jurisdictions. The magnitude of these spatial economic differences is exposed when thinking of schools in border communities of state boundaries, as in the example above. These are tied both to the historical development of public education within their jurisdictions as well as contemporary political manoeuvring with state and federal interventions. The differences in available government funding, together with the differences in parental contributions, highlight the difference in the ability of schools to provide facilities and enrichment. The spatial economic maldistribution across state jurisdictions, layered with the maldistribution across sectors is further complicated by economic stratification within public systems.

Within system maldistribution

The social segregation of schools within state public jurisdictions is evident in the contextual details of a school and their ability to raise funds or attract external support (Rowe and Perry 2022; Thompson, Hogan, and Rahimi 2019), leading to unequal educational outcomes (OECD 2012). Australian public schools are increasingly forced to rely on locally raised funds, through fundraising, facility rental, success in applying for grants, and connecting with philanthropic organisations (Rowe and Perry 2020, 2022; Yoon, Young, and Livingston 2020). Individual schools within the same system are reliant on the ability of their community to contribute (through fees and fundraising), the tenacity of their principal in applying for available grants (which has significant workload implications), and philanthropic largesse, all of which contribute to competition between schools.

Relying on some form of philanthropy in public schooling in a democratic society where education is a right and not bestowed based on the kindness of those with money is deeply concerning and paternalistic. It also allows governments to shirk responsibility for adequate and appropriate funding for public schooling and exacerbates how some schools can attract such support thus disadvantaging others (Reid 2020). In Table 6, the 2019 income from private sources per student by sector and state illustrates the different capacities of government, Catholic and independent schools to access funding to enhance education with the greatest disparity between government and independent schools.

Table 6. 2019 income (AUD) from private sources, $ per FTE student by state and sector (ACARA 2021b).

States	Government	Catholic	Independent
ACT	188	616	1,160
NSW	202	544	1,626
NT	492	1,807	1,130
Queensland	318	622	917
SA	214	505	984
Tas	154	1,286	996
Vic	363	379	1,112
WA	179	402	789
Australia	266	521	1,199

In addition to philanthropy, most schools and communities are committed to raising funds locally. These funds benefit individual schools within systems and illustrate the spatial justice implications of different school contexts. For example, Table 7 outlines the income from parent contributions, other private contributions, government funding, and total income per student for six government secondary schools within the same Victorian local government area. This region, outside of the capital city but within commuting distance, is characterised by a mix of towns and villages, rural holdings with a cross-section of socio-economic advantage. According to the Socio-Economic Index For Areas (SEIFA), a measure that ranks relative socio-economic advantage and disadvantage, some areas are the most advantaged in Victoria, while others, are the least (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2018).

Table 7. 2019 income (AUD), $ per FTE student for five government secondary schools in one region, Victoria (www.myschool.gov.au).

Government School	ICSEA	School enrolment	Federal recurrent funding $/student	State recurrent funding $/student	Parent contributions $/student	Other private sources $/student	Total income $/student
School C	1052	569	2,889	11,010	1,971	706	16,577
School D	1014	1529	2,717	10,795	421	164	14,098
School E	1007	1780	2,535	9,909	1,191	333	13,968
School F	985	855	3,235	12,738	537	723	17,234
School G	975	239	3,452	13,246	715	444	17,857
School H	955	636	4,507	16,044	38	302	15,876

Parent contributions in Victoria allow schools to offer educational experiences over and above ‘a quality education based on the standard curriculum’ (Victoria State Government 2020, 1). Table 7 illustrates how the ability of parents to contribute additional money to their children’s school varies according to the ICSEA of the school which indicates the average level of educational advantage for students. Table 7 also indicates the state and federal recurrent funding received by the schools and gives an indication of the equity funding received by each of these secondary colleges. Parent contributions are lowest in School H which has the lowest ICSEA and where state equity funding is highest ($945,061 for social disadvantage reported in their Annual Report). Despite this, School C, located in the most advantaged area in the same region, had a greater total income than School G because parental contributions added $1971 per child.

These schools also receive funds from private sources including ‘donations, interest on bank accounts, profits on trading activities and profits from sale of assets … some private income received for capital purposes, and from school and community fundraising activities’ (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority 2020, 22). For School C, this amounted to $706 per student, and for School G, $302. School C’s income included $744,882 in locally raised funds in 2020 (Annual Report), whereas School H in 2019 had access to $134,368 (Annual Report). This indicates a maldistribution of discretionary funds according to the ability of the local community to fund raise (Yoon, Young, and Livingston 2020), or the commitment and ability of the principal to connect with philanthropic organisations or apply for every funding opportunity. It also represents an abdication of responsibility for adequately funding schools (Reid 2020) and economic maldistribution within the same school system and the consequential geographies of the school location.

The differences in parental contributions and private funding income between these two government schools indicate the extent to which each school can offer students anything other than the core curriculum. School C, located in the most advantaged location in the region, and one of the most advantaged in the state, is within five kilometres of two elite independent schools and another government secondary school and ‘strives to compete favourably’ for students with these schools (Annual Report). It offers the International Baccalaureate (IB) as well as, before the covid pandemic, accepting full fee-paying international students who pay an annual fee of $14,500. School H, on the other hand, within the same system of public schools and located only 20 kilometres away, has limited discretionary income from parents and private sources.

As a low SES school, School G appears to be able to raise more funds from parents and other external funders than its neighbour, School H. This may be to do with its contextual factors as a small new school with new buildings and facilities, and their ability to recover the ‘voluntary’ contributions from parents. School G has been able to attract students away from other neighbouring public schools, distinguishing itself in the market and setting fees and charges described by the principal as ‘a user-pays system to enable us to enhance and broaden student experiences’. It also competes with the two independent elite schools neighbouring School C, and three other elite private schools within the region that draw their students from across the whole region.

The data in Table 7 is a stark indication of the variability of the funding of public schools in their ability to raise funds over and above the funding provided by both state and federal governments, but also in how variable government funding is between schools. These schools are not outliers within the public system but illustrate growing hierarchies within state public education systems (Rowe and Perry 2022; Thompson, Hogan, and Rahimi 2019). The reproduction of privilege seen in the divide between schooling sectors is mirrored in increasingly hierarchical public systems, where some schools can and do raise additional funds, where others simply cannot. The consequence for School H, with significantly lower levels of parent and private discretionary funding for the school, is narrower offerings of curriculum, enhancement, and enrichment programmes for their students. This maldistribution contributes to a tiered public education system and challenges the education goals of the Mparntwe declaration that every student should be supported ‘to be the very best they can be, no matter where they live’ (Education Council 2019 2).

Concluding discussion: scales of spatial injustice and school funding

We have attempted to highlight, through a spatial lens, the consequential geographies of school funding in Australia through three funding layers: between sectors, between state jurisdictions, and within state jurisdictions. Our desire was to add further nuance to understanding the economic maldistribution of school funding by incorporating a spatial perspective. We use these layers to represent and explore multi-scalar policy layering leading to economic maldistribution in school funding. These layers influence every school in Australia: from a macro level in the tensions of the increasing public funding of non-government schools, to the micro level of the ability of individual parents to contribute private funds to the government schools their children attend. The inclusion of a spatial perspective at multiple scales suggests issues of micro- and macro-justice (Bret 2018).

At a macro level, the arguments highlighting the economic maldistribution between Australian school sectors are well rehearsed with an acrimonious 170-year history. The old antagonisms along the lines of religion and class in schooling are evident in the hierarchies created by the continued public funding of non-government schools, leading to questions about the ‘publicness’ of schooling (Gerrard 2018; Gerrard, Savage, and O'Connor 2017). Where the Gonski reforms attempted to redistribute funding to schools in the service of equity through needs-based funding, politicians promised the non-government sectors they would not lose any of their funding. Subsequent political manoeuvring by powerful lobbies has seen increased spending in the non-government sectors. Parents who live in proximity to non-government schools and have the cultural capital and financial capacity to make the choice to educate their children in these sectors expect public money to support their choice, a choice underwritten by all taxpayers including those who are economically and spatially excluded from such a choice. Their political advantage now makes it highly unlikely that any political party would attempt to redress this maldistribution. Those who would miss out, i.e. independent schools, use their political power for compensation, thus maintaining the injustice. At this scale, the spatialisation of choice is exposed as predominantly urban-normative, where the choice between sectors is limited by ‘supply’ of schooling options and parental income in vast areas of Australia.

Spatial maldistribution is exposed in the differential spending on education by different state jurisdictions whose funding is a shared responsibility with the federal government. This was recognised in the Gonski report as an impediment to equitable spending on schooling and equity loadings were developed to ameliorate these injustices: an attempt at ‘territorial rebalancing’ for corrective and reparative purposes (Morange and Fol 2014, 17). Policies such as the Gonski equity funding, however, have been thwarted through political intervention. The data indicate there remain significant differences between state governments in their education expenditure, and their expectations of parents to contribute.

At a micro level, the spatial distribution of advantage and disadvantage exposes increasingly socially segregated schools related to the ability of individuals and communities to contribute to their children’s education (Rowe and Perry 2020, 2022; Thompson, Hogan, and Rahimi 2019). The increasing reliance by governments and schools on locally raised funds contributes to the reframing of education from a public to a private good. This reframing has implications for the possibilities of resisting the ongoing dismantling of public education.

The ‘socio-spatial gaps’ (Costes 2014, 1) created by the uneven spatial distribution of advantage and disadvantage at macro-and micro-scales, the three layers of maldistribution we have discussed, highlight ‘fortified fragments’ of society (Harvey 2008, 32). Following Connell (2002), if we turn our attention to public schools located in advantaged communities, we increasingly see what Soja describes as ‘archipelagos’ of fortified spaces that exclude others through social, economic, and political means (2000, 299). These archipelagos are reinforced by the ability of parents and communities to contribute exacerbated by competitive markets between sectors, and increasingly between government schools, rather than reinforcing the ‘systemness’ of public school systems. The hierarchies long evident between sectors are now evident between schools in the same system based on their geographical location, both between rural, regional, and urban schools, and within urban areas.

Conclusion

While a ‘spatial turn’ in education and policy research has been mooted (Gulson 2007; Riveros and Nyereyemhuka 2020; Yoon, Gulson, and Lubienski 2018), a comprehensive inclusion of spatial perspectives in such research, apart from rural education research, is not standard and the dynamics of spatiality tend to still be treated as a static container for the socio-historical. The data we have examined in this paper, it can be argued, are not new. There is a strong body of research that examines the injustices in school funding in Australia. What we have attempted to do is to use a theorising of spatial justice to add nuance to these well-known issues to see and think about the problem in new ways. We have used a spatial lens to examine economic maldistribution in order to add nuance to the ‘poisonous’ history of school funding in Australia which has led to increasingly high levels of educational inequality (Chzhen et al. 2018).

We explored the uneven impacts of urban-normative notions of school choice and the public funding of the non-government school sectors, the consequential geographies of political decision-making about school funding across state jurisdictions, and the inequalities between schools within the same state education systems. With the growing inequalities explored in this paper, a public school system that appears to be residualising, and public education in the process of becoming a private good, what can be done? A key desire of Soja’s theorising of spatial justice suggests an emancipatory project emphasising democratic and political transformative action (Morange and Quentin 2018; Soja 2010). In particular, Soja explored social activism through ‘cohesive coalitions and regional confederations of grassroots and justice-oriented social movements’ (Soja 2010, 6) as a way of struggling for spatial justice.

In considering the spatial expressions of school funding maldistribution in Australia, what might an emancipatory project look like? Where these injustices in the past may have engendered social movements to resist, such as the Purple Sage movement in the 1990s in Melbourne (Blackmore 2011) and Defence of Government Schools in the 1970s, parents are now individualised and responsibilised, seeking positional advantage (Thrupp 2007) for their own child in education. It is clear there is a little political will to address the incremental dismantling of public education. The activist work of teacher unions and organisations like Save Our Schools (Cobbold 2020), along with academic research that attempts to influence policy in these areas is critical. However, those parents who may have organised to fight for the public system in the past, leveraging their political power through the ballot box, are now fighting for individual schools (raising money and making contributions) competing with the neighbouring schools, not a system of public education.

Disclosure statement

Co-authors Jane Wilkinson and Brad Gobby were removed from the Journal of Educational Adminstration and History editorial review process.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number Australian Research Council [DP190100190].].

Notes on contributors

Katrina MacDonald

Katrina MacDonald is a senior lecturer in the School of Education, Deakin University, Australia. Her research and teaching interests are in educational leadership, social justice, spatiality, and the sociology of education through a practice lens (feminist, Bourdieu, practice architectures).

Amanda Keddie

Amanda Keddie is a Professor of Education at Deakin University. Her published work examines the schooling processes, practices and conditions that can impact on the pursuit of social justice in schools. Amanda's qualitative research has been based within the Australian, English and American schooling contexts and is strongly informed by feminist theory with a particular focus on gender.

Scott Eacott

Scott Eacott is Professor in the School of Education at UNSW and Deputy Director of the Gonski Institute of Education, Sydney and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Saskatchewan. He has developed a distinctive relational approach and further details can be found at www.scott.eacott.com

Jane Wilkinson

Jane Wilkinson is a Professor of Educational Leadership at Monash University, Australia. Jane's research interests are in educational leadership for social justice and practice theory (feminist, Bourdieuian and practical philosophy). Jane has conducted extensive research with refugee students in schools and universities in regional and urban Australia. Jane's books include: Challenges for public education: Reconceptualising educational leadership, policy and social justice as resources for hope (with Richard Niesche and Scott Eacott, Routledge, 2019) and Educational leadership as a culturally-constructed practice: New directions and possibilities (with Laurette Bristol, Routledge, 2018). Jane is co-editor (with Amanda Heffernan) of the Journal of Educational Administration and History.

Jill Blackmore

Jill Blackmore is Alfred Deakin Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, and former Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Futures and Innovation and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia. Her research interests include, from a feminist perspective: globalisation, education policy and governance; international and intercultural education; educational restructuring, leadership and organisational change; spatial redesign and innovative pedagogies; teachers' and academics' work, all with a focus on equity. Recent higher education research has focused on disengagement with and lack of diversity in leadership, international education and graduate employability. Her research has focused in particular on the re/constitution of the social relations of gender in and through education in the early 21st century.

Richard Niesche

Richard Niesche is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His research interests are in the areas of educational leadership, the principalship and social justice in education. He has published his research in a number of peer reviewed journal and books. His latest book (co-edited with Dr Amanda Heffernan) is Theorising Identity and Subjectivity in Educational Leadership Research published with Routledge.

Brad Gobby

Brad Gobby is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at Curtin University, Western Australia. He has published widely on the topics of education policy, politics and school autonomy in international journals and edited books, is an editorial board member of the Journal of Educational Administration and History.

Notes

1 For comprehensive histories of Australian education funding, see Campbell and Proctor (2014), Greenwell and Bonnor (2022), and Rudkin (2005).

2 ICSEA indicates the socio-educational backgrounds of students and is not a school rating. It is benchmarked at an average of 1000 (ACARA 2021a).

3 These data were taken directly from the government source documents and rounding or truncation errors exist which cannot be determined from the original data presented.