Feature: What Julia Gillard's 'My School' website won't tell you

While Ms Gillard says her site will provide ‘rich contextual information’ against which the numerical results can be interpreted, she and her state and federal colleagues have been prepared to go ahead with the reales of the data without any information about the resources available to individual schools.

Background

The Minister originally promised that the website would contain a breakdown of all sources of income, broken down by source (i.e. government, fees and other).

While the private school lobby objected to the inclusion of funding data, the Minister pushed ahead.

Subsequently, the funding data was dropped on the grounds that it would be administratively too difficult to collect, at least for this year.

Funding

The data that the website does not reveal includes:

• 42 wealthy private schools receiving more than $2 million a year in state and federal subsidies (see below for the full list), including

• Schools such as Trinity, Pymble Ladies College, Barker College, MLC Burwood, Kings, Knox and Newington receiving more than $5 million in public funding per year.

This comes on top of these schools collecting tens of millions in fees, all of which remains hidden on Minister Gillard’s website.

John's Comments:

Greens NSW MP John Kaye said: “The absence of school funding data adds yet another layer of deception to the ‘my school’ website.

“Not only are the school test results deeply misleading, but important information about government subsidies to private schools and private income has been deliberately withheld.

“Without information on the amount of money collected in fees and the subsidies paid by state and federal governments, the website’s claim to provide ‘rich contextual information’ is nonsense.

“The website should not have gone ahead without the full set of data. Along with all the other statistical problems, community members are left guess as to the relative wealth of the schools they are supposed to be judging.

“With schools like Trinity, Pymble Ladies College, MLC Burwood, Kings and Knox receiving more than $5 million a year in subsidies, it is little wonder that the information on both fees and government funding has been suppressed.

“We estimated that at least ten wealthy NSW private schools pulled in more than $35 million a year in fees and other charges as well as government subsidies. That is substantially more than twice the amount equivalent-sized public schools would have spent.

“Community members looking at the ‘my school’ site for schools like Trinity, Barker, Scots, Pymble Ladies College and Sydney Grammar would not know that they earned more than $44 million in government subsidies, fees and other income. They would not know that a typical one thousand student public high school had less than $14 million spent on teachers and other operating costs.

“Julia Gillard and Verity Firth are keen to promote their so-called ‘transparency agenda’ so long as it does not offend the wealthy private school lobby.

“Excuses about the data being too difficult to collect and that it will happen sometime in the future do not excuse the appalling absence of funding details in the first release of the website.

“Parents should treat the ‘my school’ website and the league tables that have been derived from it with the contempt they deserve.

“Excuses about rich contextualised information and full transparency are worthless when important data like the income and subsidies of private schools are hidden from public view,” Dr Kaye said.