Just in case you thought education was about education….

Elite Melbourne boys’ school Haileybury College, run by the Uniting Church, has gone cautiously co-ed. Rather than starting from a particular year level, it wants to sprinkle girl germs throughout the school community. Since they are doing it by running single sex classes and allowing mingling in other activities, they have obviously thought about this dynamic.

I bet the girls are supposed to civilise the boys, and for that you need numbers. You can’t just have the occasional year twelve girl as a kind of zoo exhibit, a focus of hormonal fury. Besides, the separate class thing only works if you have a group of girls.

So they needed some girls quickly, and they adopted a standard free enterprise solution. They bought some.

They put ads in the paper, offering a scholarship competition, and quickly harvested 200 damsels in educational distress.

It is a lay down misere for the parents – a prestigious school for little or nowt, to get rid of that nasty government school label, or the approbrium of a cheaper Catholic school, where fees are around $1600 per year, compared to Haileybury’s $18000.

So how is Haileybury paying for this? An Age analysis has the answer:

‘Whether or not they are on scholarships, students still attract government funding. In Haileybury’s case, this is $3706 per student.

For the 200 new students Haileybury has taken on, this amounts to $741,000.

Even if every girl receives a full scholarship, the extra funds are almost enough to cover the cost of an additional 12 to 15 teachers.

“In a business sense, as long as whatever the kids are paying is offsetting the cost of the teachers, you’re not losing any money,” says Carey Grammar principal Phil De Young.

The real cost is the extra infrastructure, which is higher for Haileybury because its “parallel education” model, with no mixed classes, effectively involves duplicating a school.

But those costs will also be recouped in future years as more full-fee-paying girls come through the system.

Melbourne University educationist Richard Teese said the other reason top schools went co-ed was the educational benefits.

“Get a top student, her behaviour in class as a role model for the other students, and the possibility she’ll assist with others, is extremely important and worth paying for,” he says. “What they get is increased efficiency, improved performance.”

Haileybury’s revenue from tuition fees and government grants jumped from $27 million in 2003 to more than $37 million in 2005, and total government grants to the school topped $7.3 million in 2005.

Its advertising and marketing budget jumped to almost $1 million last year. The costs, too, are evident. The school carries debt of $8.7 million.”

The other schools are extremely pissed off. They are complaining to the Uniting Church, who may even want to apply a dose of that weird Christianity stuff to this unpleasant trading in academic excellence.

How would you feel if you were the parent of a sixteen year old kid at one of the loser schools, in which the energy of excellence disappears, as the bright girls go off to a school which claims to be better?

Ah, but we have to get with the program. Business is business. You can’t afford to send your kid to Haileybury? Your child deserves a second class world.

What the looted nuns really think is pretty fairly summed up in the photograph above, which they should post to the Uniting Church.

“Sister Brigid Arthur, a member of the governing board of the schools, said Haileybury “doesn’t seem to have much conscience about its relations with other schools”…

….Sister Helen Toohey… said… “We in the Catholic system try to have a co-operative system to preserve the common good. That doesn’t appear to be a value in this case,” …

Killester principal Leanne Di Stefano said: “It would be offensive if Haileybury took the credit for the year 12 achievements of girls next year after having them for such a short time.”

She lamented that “schools are businesses now, and this is how we do things”…

…. But Haileybury principal Robert Pargetter came out swinging, saying the move to include girls “supported with some scholarships” was common practice.

“We understand it’s difficult, but it’s a one-off and we didn’t feel like we could reject girls who won scholarships fairly on the grounds of the school they went to,” he told The Sunday Age.”

As the parents polish their kids up for their new prestigious school, at least they are getting fair warning that the principal is a hypocrite.
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On another matter entirely, I found this link by accident, which made me think in a time of racial hysteria. What on earth – even in the madness of World War 2 – would make you harvest Japanese babies from orphanages to intern them?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Austrapolitics, ideas and society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.