Institute of Advanced Studies

Funding of non-government schools by both Labor and Coalition governments has encouraged an unprecedented growth of religiously influenced schooling with apparent little regard for the Australian Constitution. It has not been the allegedly elite independent schools of the ilk of Mark Latham’s notorious “hit list” of 61 schools who have been advantaged, but the emergent form of non-Catholic, low fee, systemic schools with specific religious affiliations and evangelical motives.

My doctoral thesis reported how the Heads of sixteen of Australia’s best known and long-established independent Church schools described the experience of their leadership and the nature of the relationship they negotiated with the contemporary Church. The research conclusions challenged common perceptions about the nature of the religiosity¹ extant in these schools and gave cause for reflection about the fairness of the case of those who oppose on religious grounds the receipt of public funding by these allegedly elite institutions.

Virtually all non-government schools declare degrees of Church allegiance or are attached to a religious organisation. The famous DOGS submission to the High Court in 1978² was premised upon the constitutional opinion that the public funding of religiously affiliated schools is in breach of Section 116 of the Australian Constitution. The argument before the Court was that public funds were being applied illegally in support of the continued development of the Churches and religious organisations because of their sponsorship of schools with evangelistic and catechetical aims.

In fact, my research indicated that the long-established Anglican and Uniting Church schools – together the largest sector of such schools in Australia³ - are in a state of constant ironic tension, even conflict, with the Churches which bear their name. They resist any evangelical expectations of their religious education programs and none incorporate elements of denominational catechesis. They respect their religious heritage, but determinedly hold the contemporary church at arms length. In short they will not allow religious doctrinarism to transcend educational integrity. When asked, for example, what the Church would make of his somewhat radical approach to the conduct of chapel services, one of my respondents, also an ordained minister, stated firmly: ‘I couldn’t care less.’ Another, the Head of a high profile school, long a favourite among the social establishment of its capital city, was adamant: ‘We are not in the business of conversions.’⁴

Section 116 of the Australian Constitution reads:
The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

In 1978, the Australian Council for the Defence of Government Schools (DOGS) was established and issued the High Court challenge to the constitutional validity of State-aid within the meaning of Section 116. The 5-1 majority decision rejecting the application was not published until 1981. Although among the defendants were listed Catholic clergy from a Victorian diocese, including its Bishop, non-Catholic denominational schools were also represented. Hogan (1984) comments:

…a bigoted Protestant element was no longer apparent in the political alliance which the DOGS maintained. Much more obvious were the teachers and parents of children in government schools for whom religion generally was either irrelevant or something anti-social which should have no part in Australian schools (p.8).

The judgement of the High Court that State-aid for church schools did not facilitate the ‘establishment’ of a religion was highly characterised by legal interpretation of words and phrases. The Court took any use of the term established to refer to the historical concept of a state-sponsored church, something akin to the status of the Church of England in the United Kingdom and applied with the same intent of meaning in the American Constitution (Puls 1991). The dissenting judge, Justice Murphy, believed this definition of ‘establishment’ adopted by his brother judges was obsolete and not applicable to the Australian context. He argued that even if State-aid was distributed on a ‘non-preferential basis’ (Puls 1991, p.163) sponsoring or aiding a religion is still ‘establishing religion’ (p.163). Murphy’s opinion was to receive support in 1986 when a legal opinion on the DOGS decision was published which examined the statutory establishments of the Church of England and concluded:

This attempt by the [Australian High Court] in the late twentieth century to give a nineteenth century definition to a word, which had particular political and religious connotations for many centuries, [is] historically defective (Ely in Puls 1991).

Justice Murphy’s understanding of the term was clearly represented by his pointed references to the degree of religious activity - by which he meant religious instruction and worship - occurring in Church schools which, it could be argued, would not be occurring without the support of public funds.

The cleavage of the State-aid debate changed in the early 1980’s from being simply anti-Catholic to being characterised by a more general religious versus secular argument (Hogan 1984). Many Catholics had suspected in the 1980’s that opposition to State-aid to non-government schools, a hefty proportion of which at the time were Catholic parochial or systemic schools, was merely a disguised form of anti-Catholic prejudice. There had been signs of such sectarian bitterness as early as 1961 when virtually all the major Protestant denominations embraced a pamphlet called Equity of Education for the Australian Nation as an expression of their own opposition to State-aid. Yet by 1965, these same Churches were experiencing their own internal divisions as federal government capital funds began to flow into non-Catholic independent Church schools for science and library capital facilities.⁵ By the conclusion of the Labour Party Hobart Conference of 1969, all the major political parties had adopted pro State-aid policies (Hogan 1984) and all the sectors of non-government, religiously affiliated schooling were declaring their very dependence upon it. They further contended that state-aid represented practical validation of the right of freedom of choice expressed in Article 26 of the 1948 United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights.⁶ 

But there is now a new cleavage. The State-aid issue is currently entangled in the complexity of two dimensions of religiously affiliated or Church sponsored schooling. The low fee systemic schools now stand in contrast to and in enrolment competition with the long-established high fee independent schools.

To understand the significance of the new low fee religious school phenomenon, it is important to note at this stage, that most long-established high fee independent schools, including the Catholic order-owned schools, were not founded by diocesan edicts or acts of synods. They were mostly set up by prominent citizens of the colonies prior to Federation or, if Catholic schools by religious orders of priests and nuns, sometimes in open hostility to the diocesan bishop.

It is not the task of this essay to trace the history of denominational independent schooling and its place within Australian life for over 150 years. However, the vast majority of Anglican and Uniting Church independent schools were never vigorous in representing denominational evangelism, but inclined to more broadly based reflection on what were the duties of an educated person with a civic responsibility. Research in the last decades of the twentieth century confirms that these schools were more successful in educating for character and deportment than they were in ecclesiastical priorities or loyal values of witness to the faith tradition of a denomination (Hyde 1990).

In the course of my own research, I read over twenty published histories of Anglican and Uniting Church independent schools, many of whom were written by respected academics. The historical narratives reveal diversity – even eccentricity. They could never be construed as an homogenous vision of education prescribed by a synod of a Church. Their foundation was rather part of the axiomatic relationship between Christian belief and Christian citizenship which altruistic individuals and civic leaders assumed their colonies needed as they moved towards being part of a broader nationhood and representative government. The schools retained an incidental allegiance to a denomination which in the manner of those institutionalized times represented Christian stewardship, the very qualities that it was argued young people of the colony needed to take into the future. The favoured educational model represented in all the schools was something akin to the prestigious and ancient boarding schools of the mother country, which, ironically, were mostly non-denominational although rich in religious convention and tradition through their loyalty to the establishment Church of England (Clark 1973).

In 1991, the New Schools Policy of the Federal Government gave major funding advantages to new non-government schools which were not to be independent but to operate as part of a system. This was a time when the Hawke Labour Government was quite brazenly declaring that its educational policy would contain certain curriculum imperatives in exchange for funding in order to force all schools into a closer technocratic relationship with the economy. There is some evidence to surmise that the Minister of Employment, Education and Training, John Dawkins, in particular, wanted to encourage the collectivisation of all Australian schools, because systems were easier to influence and deal with than hundreds of individual, independent schools scattered around the country.

The result was that for the first time in Australian history, systems of religious schools, other than Catholic, began to be established by mainstream Churches or religious groups. The incentive to systemise built into funding levels also encouraged another outcome, about which successive governments appeared to have remained disinterested. In order to attract the maximum level of recurrent funding support under the distribution process or ERI (the Educational Resources Index), the promoters of these new schools were quick to recognise they could operate with extremely low fees which was highly attractive to the Churches, if only on professed grounds of social equity.

All of this was due to an inherent anomaly in the logic of how the ERI was applied. Because there was no statutory accountability requirement for their needs-based funding, low fee schools could choose, year after year, to maintain a low resource base and thus deflect their additional funds towards keeping their tuition fees as low as possible. This was often proclaimed as representing these schools’ (and their sponsoring Churches’) commitment to social justice, which jarred the sensibilities of the long-established, high resource schools, whose significant capital assets, accrued in many cases for over one hundred years, prevented them within the ERI formula from drawing additional funds to subsidise tuition fees.

Since the 1960’s, disquiet within the mainstream non-Catholic Churches about their established schools had also been simmering. Tags of elitism were randomly attached to them. Tuition and boarding fees had become less and less accessible to the broad socio-economic middle class. At annual Synods, it became not uncommon to hear complaints about some of Australia’s best known independent church schools, that they failed to satisfy their church’s core evangelical expectations and that they should be closed down, disenfranchised or in some way or other brought to account.

But instead of forcing the issue with their existing schools, the Churches, with the possible exception of the Lutherans, found a new way to remain active in Australian schooling and to reconcile the criticisms. Whatever the inadequacies of philosophy and process they perceived in their affiliated high fee independent schools and with whom they had long been in association, the Churches did not confront the schools themselves. The Anglican and Uniting Churches especially showed a cautious reticence to intervene, revealing perhaps that they recognised their limited capacity to legally mandate any reforms.⁷ 

The Churches’ solution, acted upon first and most energetically by the Anglicans, and then emulated by the Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists, was to step away from any confrontation and construct a different model for their involvement in schooling: the concept of the low fee, low resource Church school.

The Anglican Church has now established in four Australian states, systems of Anglican low fee schools, which overtly follow the general mandate to be, as Anglican Primate, Archbishop Peter Carnley, declared in 2004 ‘schools (which are) very much part of the mission of the Church’. The Uniting Church has not yet established systems of low fee schools, although the matter has been investigated in Queensland after a Schools’ Review Task Group was established in 1999.  An attempt in Western Australia was abandoned when one of its first systemic low fee schools closed through inadequate planning and finance. Another, Tranby College in Baldivis, is now a thriving independent school but has maintained its low fee structure. St Stephen’s College, also strong and low fee, has always been an independent school founded by a group of worshippers from a local congregation in 1984.

It is reasonable to infer that the example of the Anglican low fee systemic school has been replicated in the other Churches, including the Catholics. The low fee systemic school is seen by Bishops and Synods as a response to the perceived difficulties of families to afford a Christian education in the Church’s tradition through its long-established independent schools. Co-educational, low-fee day schools were designed which were ‘socio-economically comprehensive, overtly Christian in emphasis and accessible to the disadvantaged and children with disabilities’ (WAASC, 2003).

In 2003-2004, along with the schools of the Australian Association of Christian Schools, this new phenomenon of low-fee, non-Catholic, systemic church schooling represented the fastest growing sector of non-government schooling in Australia (ISCA, 2005, p.17). Between 1980 and 2003, the Lutherans, the Baptists, the Anglicans, the Australian Associations of Christian Schools, the Adventists and a range of smaller religious groups or lifestyle sects, had established nearly 700 schools with approximately 300,000 students enrolled and over 2500 full time teachers employed (ISCA 2005). Perplexed by the postmodernist world and parental anxiety about moral relativism, the Churches and religious groups were quick to make the most of the favourable opportunity available through the ERI funding formula and the New Schools Policy. Yet the overtly declared and aggressive religious motivation behind the establishment of these systemic, religious schools was never challenged politically or within the significance of Section 116 of the Federal Constitution. In simple terms those opposed to state aid or seeking to halt the march of students from government to non-government schooling fired at the wrong target. The Latham “hit list” was clumsy, old fashioned rhetoric, because huge numbers of middle class swinging voters were part of that march into the new systemic, religious schools, believing themselves to be immune from criticism of elitism attached to the long-established high fee schools – whose tuition fees they would never have been able to afford anyhow and who therefore were a political irrelevancy to them.

The attitude of the Lutheran Church, an impressively well organized system of religiously-based schooling, and the Australian Associations of Christian Schools is especially contentious. Two subtle philosophic issues have underpinned the determined commitment of both organisations to low fee schooling. The sharp irony of these issues is particularly unsettling for long-established independent Church schools because they pointedly target the use of the use of the words ‘independent’ and ‘church’ in giving new meaning to the practice of religiosity in the low fee schools.

There has always been a tight relationship between the Lutheran Church and its schools in 160 years of Lutheran schooling in Australia. More significantly, there has been a resolve to see the meaning of ‘independent school’ differently from the Anglicans and the Uniting Church. It explains why the Lutherans are particularly intent upon asserting their denominational distinctiveness (Bartsch, 1999, p. 2-3) in the praxis of their schools. It originates in a desire to move away from the elitist tag assigned to the long-established independent schools and a conviction that these schools have become somewhat distant from the denominational links of their foundation both in evangelical policy and in practice. In the Lutheran educational vision such a separation is untenable. Jericho (1999) commented:

Lutheran schools struggle with this term (independent)…. since they are not fundamentally independent. They are dependent on their church and the congregations that own and govern them. There is a common Lutheran ethos and culture, a dependence on one another for the development of leadership and staffing generally and a reliance on (the Lutheran) Church’s tertiary institutions for teacher education (Jericho, 1999, p.3)

Christian parent-controlled schools proclaim unequivocally a ‘Christ-centered’ education. The Mission Statement of Faith in 2003 of the coordinating executive of Christian Parent Controlled Schools Board speaks of ‘…helping teachers to teach from a Biblical point of view and in accordance with their [State] association’s policies and priorities.’

The foundation of the parent-controlled schools – the first was in 1962 – was in fact a rejection of the concept of long established independent church schooling. These schools continue to refute any suggestion that they are ‘church’ schools arguing that the traditional model of church schooling is socially elitist and contrary to the biblical precedent that the education of children is primarily the responsibility of parents. Maslen (1982) in his assessment of one of these schools - often popularly described as religiously fundamental schools, it should be noted - was left in no doubt about its evangelical aims:

No matter how enlightened the teaching technique, no matter how much freedom students have to learn at their own rate, no matter how warm and friendly the relationships between staff and students, the goal of indoctrinating students into the Christian faith is all pervasive (p. 261)

And later:

…the school and the parents…see no conflict in indoctrinating the children ‘in the ways of the Lord’ for that is both their right and their obligation (p.263).

Such descriptions, which were by no means atypical within the extensive literature review into the history of low fee schooling I conducted or contemporary practice, must sit most uneasily within the High Court judgment of 1981, particularly as they focus upon schools which are not part of any ‘established or mainstream Church’ and proclaim a defined and absolute code of religious witness and practice in which their educational praxis sits.

There is little doubt that the rapid growth of the CPC schools movement can also be explained in terms of parental anxiety about moral relativism and their desire for some defining moral absolutes for their children. The claim has been that the mainstream Churches have not succeeded in confronting these contemporary matters in their long-established schools. The direct and unchallenged involvement of parents was more in keeping with Biblical revelation, and the CPC movement was intent upon running schools which facilitated this in a very direct sense (Maslen, 1982).

Admitting openly a connection between the purposes of schooling and Christian Bible-based catechesis within denominational rites is therefore a fundamental change in the thinking of the mainstream non-Catholic Churches. The Catholic Church has always argued an unequivocal connection, all of its schools being subject to a magesterium which emantes from Rome. For Flynn (1993) this unity of purpose between Church and school gave effect to his unequivocal statement that ‘Catholic schools have no reason to exist apart from the Church’ (p.20)⁸.

On the other hand Hansen (1972) reported that in the 1970’s, non-Catholic theologians, laymen and educationalists alike ‘doubted the value of church schools within the context of the Church’s missionary life.’ (p. 43). The Methodist Conference of Victoria and Tasmania resolved in the previous decade that ‘the Church [does not] see as part of its mission, the provision of educational services for which the state has assumed responsibility’ (p. 43).

The low fee school phenomenon therefore is a dynamic indication that as the 20^th century entered its final decades, the Protestant Churches began to recognize that their continuing involvement in schools might actually be matter of their survival. Their involvement in the conduct of education began to assume new significance. The low fee systemic school was potentially a lucrative version of a congregational life, whereas out in the suburban parishes the traditional model of the worshipping faith community was collapsing. A new tier of non-government systemic church or religious schooling has consequently evolved in support of the lives of the Churches themselves. Justice Murphy would shout from the grave that it has been public funding of church schools which has facilitated this new expression of a Church’s activity in the world.

 The charges of elitism against the long-established schools from within the Churches seriously aggravated the patience of the Heads of my study. They complained that the same recurrent funding policies that enabled low fee-low resource schooling to flourish had actually reducing the ability of some of the long-established high resource schools to remain financially accessible to the Australian community (Pietzner 1997) because their income streams were reduced through enrollment competition.

The newly established dual tier of non-Catholic church schooling has not been widely recognized. It is persistently clouded by the frequently applied misnomer private schooling. Apart from the fact that virtually all non-government schools in Australia are in receipt of public funds, the term fails to point to the vast array of cultures of religiosity, and the resource levels of teaching and learning programs in the non-government sector. It has also not been the long-established schools which have enjoyed the benefits the worrying, socially divisive movement of students from government schools into the non-government sector, but the low fee religiously affiliated schools. The constitutional implications have not dawned upon the popular media which inevitably demonstrates a limited understanding of the state aid debate.

My research demonstrated that the religiosity of the long-established independent church schools, commonly targeted by the anti-State aid lobby, has virtually no elements being performed or enacted on the basis of directives from the affiliated Church. In most cases, but not all, traditional worship rituals remain, sometime compulsory for students, sometimes not. The rationale underpinning the praxis of religiosity in these long-established schools is premised upon the distinction which the Heads insist must operate between the primary educational function of a school and the enfaithing traditions of a church. The blunt statement of one Head that he was not in the business of conversions, resonated with all of the Heads as the reality underpinning their leadership of religiosity. So too did the open ended, and non-doctrinal reflection becoming embedded in reforms of religious studies programs within the formal teaching and learning curriculum. It is striking how vigorously these schools are responding to community debate about values education. One Head, a committed churchgoer himself, described the ambition which he and his colleague Heads share:  ‘The best thing we can do is to have students leave us with an understanding of what religion is and the various dimensions of religion’.

Perhaps the most energetic reformist in the learning domain of religiosity, the Head of a prestigious girls’ school, made this remark: ‘It is not a dogmatic thing; it is an exploratory thing…a hugely important part of human endeavour’.

It has been widely mooted over the last five years among non-government school lobbyists that a new High Court challenge against State-aid seems likely (Jackson 2005). Should a new challenge to State-aid be mounted in the High Court, my research demonstrates that the case for the public funding of the long-established independent church school will need to be argued differently from the low fee systemic Church or religiously affiliated parent-controlled schools. The Church schools’ education lobby will therefore be split not on sectarian grounds, but for the first time in the history of non-government church schooling, on grounds of differing philosophies of evangelism and catechesis.

The leadership of religiosity in non-government schools now sits within a much more fragile political context than might at first appear and which needs more detailed understanding before rationale consultation can occur on the place of values education and religious studies in Australian schools within the constitutional validity of State-aid. Whereas it might have been assumed that any impact of low fee schools would be essentially financial, my study raises the possibility that their impact is actually striking at the heart of the nature of independent church schooling and has uncovered unresolved questions about what as a matter of ethical educational praxis, is acceptable in a multi-cultural, postmodernist democracy such as Australia.

The publicly stated evangelism and the denominational or religious distinctiveness which the low fee systemic church schools now openly assert, and which emanates from their church-based central administrations, will have to be argued as divorced from establishing or sustaining that same church. The religiosity and educational praxis of the high fee independent church school will need to be argued as having no connection to evangelism or ecclesiastical mission. The latter case, it has become clear to me, is a more defensible and self-evident proposition.

1. I use this word to refer collectively to worship, religious instruction, chaplaincy or any other activity in the school which emanates from its religious affiliation or heritage.
2. DOGS: an acronym for the Council for the Defence of Government Schools. See www.adogs.info/
3. Official estimates tend to combine Anglican systemic and independent schools as one figure. My observation is based upon a count of schools from the National Register of Independent Schools in Australia,2006.  Educare Publishing, Melbourne, Vic.
4. The methodology of my study was phenomenological. It contained a commitment that the identity of my sixteen subjects would be kept confidential.
5. Prime Minister Robert Menzies, schooled as a scholarship boy at Wesley College, Melbourne, had a great respect for the independent schools of his time but was opposed to recurrent state aid, believing such schools would lose their distinctiveness and potential to produce the next generation of society’s leaders. His decision to support one-off special purpose grants of capital funding was a clever political compromise.
6. Article 26, sub-Clause (3) reads: Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
7. Within the limited sample group of my study, no less than four schools had initiated legal action in the last ten years to protect themselves from any potential by their Churches to intervene in their affairs. 
8. For further analyses of the implications of the Catholic magesterium upon Catholic schooling see, for example, McLaughlin (1996),  Ryan and Malone (1999) and Dulles (1995)

References

Bartsch, M 1999, The old content for a new context: Lutheran theological perspectives for the future of the Australian Lutheran school education, Australian Conference on Lutheran Education, September 1999, accessed on July 16, 2003 at http://www.lea.org.au/national/publication.asp?ssid=7andsid=359

Clark, CMH 1973, A history of Australia III: the beginning of an Australian civilisation, 1824-1851, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, Vic.

Current Affairs Bulletin 1957, The Independent Schools of Australia, Vol 21, No 3, December 2, 1957, Pamphlet of the Department of Tutorial Classes, The University of Sydney, NSW.

Dulles, Cardinal A 1995, Seven essentials of evangelisation, address to the Convocation of Bishops, Washington, USA, November 12, 1995, quoted in Religious Education Journal Origins, 25:  23.

Educare  2003, National Register of Independent Schools of Australia, Educare Publishing, Melbourne, Vic.

Flynn, M  1993, The culture of Catholic schools, St. Paul’s Press, Homebush, NSW.

Hansen, IV 1972, Nor free nor secular, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, Vic.

Hogan, M 1984, Public versus private schools, Penguin, Melbourne, Vic.

Hyde, KE 1990 (Ed), Religion in childhood and adolescence: A comprehensive review of the research, Religious Education Press, Alabama, MS.

ISCA, 2005 Independent schooling in Australia: A snapshot , Pamphlet, Independent Schools Council of Australia, ISCA, Canberra, ACT.
Jericho, A  1999, Lutheran schools: a piece of the Australian education puzzle, Australian Conference on Lutheran Education, September 1999.
McLaughlin, TH 1996, The Distinctiveness of Catholic Education, in McLaughlin, TH, O’Keefe, J and O’Keffe, B (Eds)  The Contemporary Catholic School: Context, Identity and Diversity, pp. 320 -364, The Falmer Press, London, UK.

Pietzner, J 1997  The ERI and equity, presentation to a public forum on the Education Resource Index as the basis for Australian schools’ Commonwealth recurrent funding, February 25, 1997, Association of Heads of Independent School, Mercer House, East Melbourne, Vic.

Praetz, H 1982, Public policy and Catholic schools, Australian Education Review, No 17, ACER, Melbourne, Vic.

Puls, J 1991, The Wall of Separation: Section 116, the first amendment and constitutional religious guarantees, Federal Law Review, Vol 26, pp. 138-164.

Ryan, M and Malone, P 1999, Exploring the religion classroom: a guidebook for Catholic schools, Social Science Press, Katoomba, NSW.

WASC, 2003, History and Development, Western Australian Anglican Schools Commission.