Parents with children at Western Australia’s most prestigious private schools have some of the highest median incomes in the nation, new data has revealed.
Christ Church Grammar School, Methodist Ladies’ College and St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls top the list and are not far behind in median parent earnings to Sydney schools, where annual fees can be almost double.
Parents at Christ Church have the 12th-highest median family income in Australia.
This is the first time median family incomes for private school students have been published, in response to a Senate estimates question. Previously, only income ranges were available.
It is also the first time the figures have been released after the Direct Measure of Income began in 2022 – a method to rank schools based on parents’ income to determine how much government funding schools receive.
About 30 non-government schools in WA have parents with a median taxable income above $200,000. The median taxable family income across Australia is $103,962, assuming two income earners per family.
Public education advocate Trevor Cobbold, who runs Save Our Schools and collated and analysed the data, said taxable income data was available for just 21 of those 30, as the other nine were part of school systems block-funded by the Commonwealth.
He compared parental income with the amount of funding each school gets and discovered many were being funded past their school resourcing standard – the amount required per student from the government to ensure quality education.
He said the figures demonstrated the “innate unfairness” of WA school funding.
“Hundreds of millions of taxpayer funds are being squandered on highly privileged schools while public schools go begging,” he said.
A new state and federal government agreement invests almost $1.6 billion in WA public schools over the next four years.
Perth schools with the highest-paid parents revealed.Credit: Holly Thompson/ Supplied
While the state government said this would make WA the first Australian state or territory bar the ACT to fund schools to 100 per cent of the school resourcing standard, some call this claim false.
The State School Teachers’ Union WA and its national counterpart said it would still leave schools short, as the funding share was “artificially inflated” through the inclusion of costs not directly related to student education.
Cobbold, who agrees with this, also said the Direct Measure of Income method was fundamentally flawed because it ignored other sources of income including from grandparents, the “bank of mum and dad”, non-taxed capital gains and business and investment diverted to family trusts.
“The DMI also ignores lucrative sources of income of elite private schools such as multi-million donations to school building funds as well as income from financial investments, rental properties and hire of facilities such as swimming pools,” he said.
“All this shows just how unfair school funding is. It heavily favours the already advantaged sectors of Western Australian society at the expense of the most disadvantaged.”
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