The proportion of Australian children enrolling in public schools is continuing to decline despite cost-of-living pressures hitting families, new data has revealed.
The latest schools data, released on Wednesday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), found the proportion of students enrolled in government schools dropped from just over 68% in 2002 to to 64.5% last year.
There were 16,929 fewer students enrolled in public education in 2022 compared with 2021, a 0.6% drop and the second consecutive year enrolments decreased.
The Grattan Institute’s education program director, Jordana Hunter, said governments would have a “marketing challenge” on their hands to encourage families back to public education.
“There’s a perception that non-government schooling is a stronger option … regardless of whether that’s accurate,” she said.
“There’s a risk it becomes self-perpetuating and that can skew enrolment characteristics. Governments should be looking at this data and asking themselves ‘why is there this ongoing drift’?”
Hunter said the findings would also place pressure on public schools, which relied on enrolment levels for overall budgets.
Independent schools were leading the rise in enrolments for 2022, with a 3.3% increase compared with 2021.
Over the past decade, enrolments in independent schools increased by over 25% (130,306), compared with government school enrolments, which rose 11% (263,447), and an 8% (58,773) rise in Catholic schools.
A further 11,795 students enrolled in schools in 2022, representing an annual increase of 0.3% – the lowest growth rate since 1995, when full-time and part-time students were first included in ABS reporting.
The University of Melbourne professor of educational leadership, Pasi Sahlberg, said the findings were a “direct result of chronic underfunding of public education, worsening teacher workforce crisis, and government policies that have encouraged parents to do ‘shop around’ for better education”.
As enrolments at government schools have declined, so too have rates for students completing schooling through to year 12, which have dropped significantly compared with 2002.
Just over 76% of students in public education completed year 12 in 2022, down from 83.1% from 2018.
Overall, the rate of year 7 and 8 students staying in school full-time through to year 12 was at 80.5% in 2022, down from 83.1% in 2021. The retention rate for girls (84.9%) was significantly higher than for boys (76.3%).
Retention rates were highest for independent schools (94.2%) followed by Catholic schools (80.9%).
Hunter said the drop-off in attainment levels was “troubling”.
“We know outcomes for students who finish school are much stronger as a cohort than students who don’t,” she said. “If these kids aren’t at school, where are they?”
The senior lecturer in inclusive education at RMIT, Dr David Armstrong, said it wasn’t a coincidence attainment rates were decreasing.
“It’s an indicator about the severe strain the public system is under,” he said.
“The chickens have come home to roost for policies and processes ongoing for some time – models around micromanaging teachers, regulation. This is another symptom of the wider crisis in education.”
While parents continued to flock to non-government schools in droves, with 28,724 more student enrolments in 2022, the increase was most notable in the independent sector.
Enrolments surged in the sector by 12.5% in the five years to 2022. In the same time period, enrolments in Catholic schools increased by 3.9%, while public school enrolments rose by just 1.9%.
The largest annual drop was in the Northern Territory, where public school enrolments fell by 2.2%, followed by New South Wales (1.4%).
Only Western Australia, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory experienced marginal increases in public school enrolments.
Enrolments in non-government schools increased 3.1% annually in South Australia, followed by Queensland (2.4%), Western Australia (2.3%) and NSW (2.2%).
The Association of Independent Schools NSW chief executive, Margery Evans, said much of the sector’s growth had been in low and mid-fee Anglican, Islamic and Christian schools in Sydney’s newer suburbs.
“Almost all of these schools serve low to middle-income communities in high-growth areas,” she said.
“Demand for places in many independent schools exceeds supply – schools report having scores of names on their waiting lists and, in some cases, hundreds of students are turned away.”
Overall, the highest number of students in non-government schools was in the ACT (39.1%) followed by South Australia (37.4), while the lowest was in the Northern Territory (26.6%), where retention rates also lagged behind the national average at just over half of students (54.2%).
While Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander enrolments increased 2.7% in 2022 on the previous year, the retention rate dropped from 59% in 2021 to 56.9% in 2022.
There were 4 million students enrolled across 9,614 schools in 2022.
