source : the age
March 13, 2026 — 3:30pm
Last week I found out that my year 5 son, due to head to Canberra next year, may not get to go. Not because of anything he’s done. But because the cost of putting on the school excursion has become so prohibitive that, for the first time in generations, the whole thing might simply not happen.
He doesn’t know yet. I’m not sure how to tell him.
It lands in the same week that the Australia Institute found Australia is now the most expensive country in the developed world to send a child to high school – at almost four times the OECD average. We have built one of the most stratified school systems in the developed world, and we are still building it.
My eldest daughter is in year 12. When she was in year 6, the Canberra trip was just what happened. She visited Parliament House, stood outside the War Memorial, argued with her friends about who got to sit at the back of the coach. Unremarkable in the best possible way. It was just what you did. That taken-for-grantedness is what’s ending.
I’ve been a P&C member at three different public schools over 13 years. I have sat in the meetings where the hard conversations happen. Swim school – gone. The “zoo snooze” overnight excursion – gone. A two-day camp that was once affordable now costs more than $500 a child, putting it out of reach for many families. Moving students two kilometres by coach for a presentation assembly costs more than $10,000. So schools stop moving. None of these things are luxuries. They are the texture of a public school education – shared experiences that shape children in ways harder to measure than test scores but no less important. When they disappear, there is rarely an announcement. The excursion simply doesn’t appear on next year’s calendar.
The numbers behind all of this are not mysterious. According to the Australian Education Union’s 2024 report A decade of inequity, the average public school will be underfunded by $2509 per student this year, while the average private school receives $462 per student above its full entitlement. More than half of private schools in NSW now receive more combined government funding per student than comparable public schools of similar size and student need. In some cases, the gap exceeds $7000 per student – at schools that are sometimes around the corner from each other.
The private school sector, receiving substantial public funding while charging uncapped fees that have risen well above inflation, has undergone a capital works boom. Overseas study tours. Term-long ski school campuses. Scottish Baronial castles. The contrast with a cancelled Canberra trip is not an accident. It is a structural outcome.
None of this is an argument against private schools, or against parents who choose them. Those are personal decisions made in good faith. The problem is not a school sector. It is a funding system that has been allowed to tilt in one direction for more than a decade, without the political will to straighten it.
The consequences compound. As the experience gap widens, more families who can afford to leave the public system do so. NSW public school enrolments have fallen by more than 24,000 since the pandemic peak. In 2024 alone, independent school enrolments grew by 3.6 per cent, and now more students attend a private school than at any other time in the state’s history. As families leave public schools, P&C fundraising – already squeezed by cost-of-living pressures – shrinks with them. The schools most dependent on the public purse are left with the least capacity to fill the gaps. The cycle feeds itself.
This is how a two-tier education system entrenches itself – not through any single dramatic decision but through the quiet accumulation of things that no longer happen. A swim school. A zoo sleepover. A Canberra trip that doesn’t make next year’s calendar.
Australia built its public education system on a promise: that the quality of a child’s schooling would not be determined by their parents’ income. The recent Better and Fairer Schools Agreement is a step towards keeping it. But public schools still sit well below the Schooling Resource Standard promised more than a decade ago. Closing that gap requires governments to treat the underfunding of public education as the genuine crisis it is – not something to be managed incrementally while the gulf widens.
My son in year 5 still has time. Probably. Across NSW, thousands of children like him are waiting to find out whether the Australia their parents knew – where a public school kid could take a coach to Canberra without it becoming a financial crisis – still exists for them. It should. It must.
Matt Sharpe is a parent of three and has been a P&C member at three Sydney public schools.
Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.
Matt Sharpe is a parent and a P&C member across three Sydney public schools.
