Private schools regularly blame inflation for rising fees, yet funding arrangements mean they are largely compensated for cost increases. Their fee-setting power widens the resource gap while feeding back into inflation itself.

The annual rite of the raising of private school fees usually happens in the January school holidays, but this year it has come early.

These fee increases provide a yearly reminder of the claims made in 2000 by the Howard Government’s education minister, David Kemp. Introducing a scheme based on neoliberal values of consumer choice and provider competition, he proclaimed that competition among a growing number of private schools would lead to lower fees as they competed for enrolments.

He got that one badly wrong.

In this country, government funding of private schools is based on a rare, if not unique, form of public-private partnership. Private schools have retained the same autonomy over their admission charges as they had when they were fully privately funded. School authorities alone decide the level of these fees according to their target market. Even to put their child’s name down on the waiting list at some schools, parents may have to pay a non-refundable deposit. As well as the stated tuition fees, families might also be faced with levies and charges for technology, buildings and facilities, camps, excursions, school buses, and particular subjects such as sport and music.

The Commonwealth uses a measure of how much total public funding a school needs for the students it enrols. Based on the advice of the 2011 Gonski Review, this is the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS), which provides the benchmark against which each school’s need is calculated.

Private schools, however, can and do set fees that exceed their SRS; so that the combined effect........

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