How affordable are independent school fees in Australia?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The independent private school sector in Australia is growing dramatically. While the sector on average enrols a larger share of socially advantaged students compared to the Catholic or public school sector, the extent to which independent school fees are financially accessible is not well known. Examining this question is important as the sector receives substantial taxpayer subsidies. We examined the fees charged by independent secondary schools in Australia’s five largest cities, collectively home to almost 65% of Australians. On average across all five cities, independent secondary schools charge approximately $15k per year, with 25% of schools charging less than $5k per year and another quarter charging more than $20k per year. Fees are highest in Melbourne and Sydney, where one-third of schools charge over $20k per year, and 10% charge more than $40k per year. Average fees varied across the five cities and are not easily explained by public policy or economic contexts. While a substantial number of independent secondary schools can be considered affordable, most are not. We query the value to Australian society of having so many high-fee independent schools and argue that Australia’s aim of increased productivity would be better met by diverting government funds spent on high-fee schools to students and schools with greater need.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".