There is a school of thought, so to speak, among many anxious parents in Sydney. It goes something like this: selective school is the first choice, private school second, then a scramble to get the child into the best possible, somewhat nearby comprehensive school in last place.
With no discernible change in the number of selective places at our public high schools each year, it’s been left to independent and Catholic schools to capitalise on the increased demand for a perceived better education.
State authorities have tried to fill the gap – introducing high performance and gifted education (HPGE) places at comprehensive state schools, and allowing students at any school that does not offer challenging subjects to enrol in them by distance education. These initiatives are good progress – if they haven’t just created another tier of demand.
As education editor Christopher Harris reports today, this has led to parents injecting $4.5 billion-plus a year into Catholic and independent schools. They might not get a Christmas card from Treasurer Daniel Mookhey, but they are saving the state a fortune.
As Harris writes, in purely academic terms, Australian private school pupils outperformed Catholic and public school counterparts in the latest round of Programme for International Assessment tests. But when adjusted for socioeconomics, there was no difference in performance between students, according to the Australian Council for Education Research.
The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) does not publish public schools’ median ATARs – which is by far the best measure of a school’s success. Many private schools do, or at least publish enough information about their ATARs for parents to have a reasonable idea.
Instead, it is left to the Herald to analyse the data that is published – that is, HSC band 6 data, indicating a mark of 90 or above in every subject – to determine a school’s ranking. The problem with this is that a student receiving 90 for standard mathematics, for example, boosts his or her school’s ranking, while a student receiving 89 for extension 2 mathematics does not. The latter mark attracts significantly more ATAR points than the former.
On this measure, comprehensive public school performance is slipping. Compared to 20 years prior, the number of non-selective public schools among the state’s top performers halved. In 2025, just nine of the state’s top 100 schools are comprehensive, and eight of those are in expensive northern Sydney suburbs.
All of this has had, and continues to have, the effect of concentrating disadvantage in comprehensive schools.
In 2025, public school enrolments fell for the seventh consecutive year, with 7000 fewer students in the system compared to 12 months prior.
Yet our public schools still educate a majority of students. Some do terrific work: only last week we reported the improvement seen at Arthur Phillip High School in Parramatta, which is returning excellent results in harder mathematics courses and outperforming the state average in HSIE subjects.
The Sun-Herald will always support parental choice and fair funding models. But the continued decline in parental faith in public comprehensive schools not something any taxpayer should be proud of.
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