Rich school, poor school: “An ABC News investigation has revealed for the first time the gaping divide that separates the capital expenditure of Australia’s richest and poorest schools. It is based on school finance figures from the My School website… The investigation, which encompasses more than 8,500 schools teaching 96 per cent of students, reveals: Half of the $22 billion spent on capital projects in Australian schools between 2013 and 2017 was spent in just 10 per cent of schools. These schools teach fewer than 30 per cent of students and are the country’s richest… They also reaped 28 per cent (or $2.4 billion) of the $8.6 billion in capital spending funded by government. … Over the past decade, public funding to private schools has risen nearly twice as fast as public funding to public schools”. It’s worth scrolling through the ABC’s data visualisation to see the scale of the problem.
13 August 2019