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How to choose a school for your kids: what the funding, staffing and research data actually show

Recently, I have been thinking (a lot) about which high school to send our kids to.

That's the premise of everything below: there's no universal answer, only the right answer for our kids, our family, and this particular moment, and it'll change as all three change. Everything below is information, not prophecy. Kids differ enormously in temperament, pace, resilience, what sets them off and what settles them, and none of what follows dictates how any particular child turns out. Two kids can sit in the same classroom, under the same teacher, and have completely different experiences of it. What follows isn't a ranking so much as a set of lenses I've been looking through, backed by data rather than vibes — I'm writing it down in case it helps you build your own answer instead of borrowing someone else's, not as a formula that outputs the right school for your kid.

I've worked inside an independent school. My partner teaches in a public school. Our own kids are in a Catholic school. So take this for what it is: a personal, opinionated take, not a neutral analysis — my attempt to reason through it with better data than vibes.

The sector label tells you less than the funding model

Before I could compare "vibes," I had to understand what each sector is built to do, because the funding architecture behind a school shapes what it can offer long before anyone ever walks through the gate.

In Australia, public money for schools comes from two places that behave almost like mirror images of each other. The Commonwealth is the majority funder of non-government (Catholic and independent) schools; state and territory governments are the majority funder of their own public schools.[1] Both are meant to be anchored to the same benchmark, the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS), a needs-based estimate of what a school needs per student.[2] For non-government schools, that amount is scaled down by a capacity-to-contribute calculation based on the community's income; wealthier school communities get a smaller share of public funding and are expected to make up the difference in fees.

But who receives that dollar differs by sector, and this is the part where it gets complicated:

The system-pooling detail matters more than most parents realise, myself included until recently. It means a diocese can, and in some regions does, direct a disproportionate share of its system's funding, capital works, and specialist staffing toward one flagship school, while other schools in the same diocese run leaner. I've seen this play out locally: one particular school in our Catholic system has clearly become the beneficiary of a much larger share of system resources than its peers. Choosing a Catholic school, I've come to realise, isn't just choosing a school: it's choosing a position in a diocese's internal resourcing hierarchy, and that position isn't visible on a glossy brochure. I've started asking the school directly (or the diocese) where it sits in that pecking order, because two Catholic schools ten minutes apart can have wildly different resourcing despite an identical sticker price.

Set the multi-campus and systemic-style operators aside for a moment, because most independent schools don't have this internal cross-subsidy: each stands or falls on its own community's capacity to pay, which is exactly why independent-school fees have such an enormous range, from a few thousand dollars a year to well over $40,000. The "independent schools are overfunded" headline usually comes from a handful of high-fee metropolitan schools; the median independent school in Australia actually charges well under $10,000 a year, and low-fee independent schools receive more government funding per student than high-fee ones, not less, because of that capacity-to-contribute mechanism.[5]

So I've stopped comparing sector labels at all, and started comparing a specific school's position within its funding structure instead: an independent school's fee tells you almost everything about its resourcing; a Catholic school's fee tells you comparatively little, because the real story is inside the diocese's ledger.[6]

Staffing ratios show what a school is actually built to do

Every school will tell you it delivers both academic excellence and strong values. Most try. But time and attention are finite, and which way a school's default settings point matters more than its mission statement.

A useful, if blunt, way to see this: public schools generally run on state-mandated wellbeing frameworks with dedicated wellbeing staff and access to departmental psychologists, spread across large, diverse cohorts. Catholic schools lean on pastoral care and service/social-justice programs woven into the religious framework. Independent schools tend to invest heavily in dedicated wellbeing teams, house systems, and advisory structures, partly because their fee structure allows for the staffing ratios needed to support it.

That staffing ratio point is real and measurable, not just marketing. National data (ABS, 2025) shows the average student-to-teacher ratio is about 11.7:1 in independent schools, 13.0:1 in government schools, and 13.3:1 in Catholic schools, a gap that has been stable for well over a decade.[7] It's a blunt proxy (it isn't the same as class size), but it correlates with how much individual attention, feedback, and relationship-building a teacher can realistically offer each student.

Class size itself follows the same sector split as everything else in this piece: who's actually on the hook for it. In NSW government schools, class sizes aren't set school-by-school; they're tied to a statewide Staffing Agreement between the Department and the NSW Teachers Federation, which allocates teachers against average targets (Kindergarten: 20, Year 1: 22, Year 2: 24) and a firmer ceiling from Year 3 up ("no class need exceed 30"). It's a funded formula, not a suggestion, which is presumably why the actual 2024 statewide Kindergarten average came in under target, at 18.1.[8] Catholic systems have no equivalent statewide rule; class-size limits, where they exist, are whatever that specific diocese has negotiated into its own enterprise agreement. Sydney Catholic Schools' 2018 agreement, for instance, only committed to capping new Kindergarten classes at 32 from 2019, already above the public system's Year 3–6 ceiling, with existing larger classes to be brought down "over time by natural attrition" — which tells you classes above 32 existed before the agreement.[9]

Independent schools sit outside this entirely: no sector-wide class-size commitment at all, just whatever each school chooses to staff to. So on class size specifically, I've stopped asking "does this sector cap class sizes" and started asking the school (or diocese) for its actual current agreement and its actual current numbers — the honest answer varies enormously even within a sector.

Reputation is a lagging indicator

A school's reputation takes decades to build and, in my experience, a single change of leadership to meaningfully shift. Word-of-mouth trades on a school as it was: a long-serving principal, a standout run of results, a head of department who happened to be extraordinary. That word-of-mouth keeps circulating for years after the people who earned it have moved on. If a school built its name under one leadership team and has since been through two or three changes at the top, the reputation you're hearing about at the school gate and the culture your kid would actually walk into next year may not be the same thing anymore.

So the useful question isn't "what's this school's reputation," it's "who is actually running it now, and what have they changed." I try to get a read on whether the people setting the tone are genuinely invested in the impact of the education they're delivering, or are managing the school as a rung on their own career ladder, because those two orientations produce different decisions on the ground even when the mission statement hasn't changed a word. Ask about staff tenure and turnover under the current leadership specifically, not the school's history. A school that has quietly lost a lot of experienced staff in the last two or three years, even one riding an excellent long-term reputation, is telling you something a prospectus won't.

Feedback loops matter more than curriculum content

There's a broad consensus across decades of education research (large-scale meta-analyses and classroom-level studies alike) that feedback and teacher–student relationships are among the strongest levers on student achievement, well ahead of curriculum content or facilities on their own.[10] What matters is whether a student finds out, quickly and specifically, what they did well and what to do next, and whether someone who actually knows them well enough can make that feedback meaningful.

The real differentiator between schools, I think, sits less with sector and more with time. Picture two teachers, each teaching six classes a week. One teacher's classes are capped at 30, so they're trying to get to know 180 students. The other's are capped at 18, so their whole workload is 108 students — nearly 70 fewer kids to track. That's the gap that decides whether a teacher has the bandwidth to notice a kid disengaging, or spot the specific misconception in their long division. Every school "knows their students" in the sense that they can recite names. Far fewer schools have the structural slack (time, staffing ratio, systems) to actually act on what they notice, consistently, for every kid, not just the ones flagging loudest.

This is also, not coincidentally, the pitch behind a model I've been reading obsessively lately: Alpha School, the Texas-based network that compresses core academics into roughly two hours a day via AI-driven, mastery-based software, freeing the rest of the day for student-chosen workshops.[11] The interesting part isn't really the AI; it's the claim about motivation. Principal Joe Liemandt argues "motivation is 90% of the solution": instant, granular feedback lets a student "bank" free time by mastering material efficiently, which the model claims produces genuine intrinsic drive rather than compliance.[11]

It leans on real research — Bloom's "2 Sigma" finding that one-on-one mastery tutoring can move an average student two standard deviations,[12] and Deci & Ryan's Self-Determination Theory, that autonomy and a sense of purpose, not rewards or punishment, are what sustain motivation.[13] Alpha's own headline performance claims are contested, though: critics point to undisclosed data, in-house assessments, and a $10,000–$75,000 tuition range that selects for an unusually advantaged student body before a single lesson is taught.[14]

I don't need to buy Alpha's marketing to take the underlying mechanism seriously. It's not about finding an Alpha school; it's become a question I put to any school we tour: how tight is the feedback loop, does the pedagogy actually use it as a lever rather than just assuming motivation and pouring everything into content delivery, and how much of that loop reaches my specific kid — not just the top or bottom of the cohort, but the average, "doing fine" kid who's easiest to overlook precisely because they're not causing a problem. How much any of this actually matters still depends entirely on the kid: some children push themselves regardless of what's around them, others need a lot more scaffolding to get going, and no amount of data about feedback loops tells you in advance which one is sitting at your kitchen table.

The questions I keep coming back to:

One more signal along these lines, and one I see the effects of firsthand at the school I work in: tutoring culture. Private tutoring has become mainstream in Australia. Recent University of Sydney research put it at roughly one in seven Australian students, spending collectively in the billions, in an industry researchers describe as almost entirely unregulated: no accreditation requirements, no consistent child-safety screening, and, critically, mixed evidence that it actually delivers a clear academic advantage.[15] It's most intense around high-stakes moments (selective school tests, HSC), and it disproportionately entrenches advantage, because it's the families who can already afford school fees who can also afford $80–$150/hour supplementary tutoring on top.[16]

Tutoring culture forces an uncomfortable question: if a school's own students routinely need paid, outside remediation or acceleration to keep up or get ahead, what does that say about whether the school's own feedback loop and teaching model is actually working? I've deliberately chosen not to want a school where tutoring is a normalised, unspoken part of "how you succeed here," not because tutoring itself is bad, but because a school culture that assumes it as a given is quietly admitting its own classroom isn't sufficient, and outsourcing the "need" column onto a market with none of the safeguards a school is required to have.

Needs and wants get conflated, and that's where budgets blow out

What we need, I've come to think, is usually: a safe environment, competent and consistent teaching of fundamentals, a peer group that isn't actively working against a child's wellbeing, and enough individual attention that problems get caught early. That bar is clearable by many public, Catholic, and independent schools; it is not the exclusive property of expensive ones.

What we want is often something else entirely: prestige, a specific values alignment, a particular co-curricular strength, a peer network, a boarding option, or simply the comfort of "everyone we know sends their kids there." None of that is illegitimate, but it's worth being honest with myself about which column a given feature sits in, because the want column is where school costs spiral and where families start making financial decisions they'd never make for any other single line item in the household budget.

That "peer group that isn't actively working against your child's wellbeing" line in the needs list is worth dwelling on, because it's usually the thing parents worry about most and talk about least directly. Bad-apple kids and bullying exist everywhere. Public schools have it worse on average, and the reason is more specific than "scale and diversity": public schools have a mandated intake, they can't turn a difficult enrolment away, where independent and Catholic schools can, and regularly do, decline enrolment or manage a student out. It's a comprehensive cohort versus a curated one. But no sector is immune, and if you're reading a piece like this you almost certainly already have an interest in who your kids end up spending their days next to. I'd argue that's substantially a parenting problem rather than a schooling one; the kids doing the most damage usually have something going on at home that no school policy fixes.

But sector does matter for response capacity: independent schools generally have the staffing slack (the ratio point from earlier) to actually investigate and resolve a bullying or peer-conflict situation properly, for every family that raises it, not just the ones who escalate loudest or threaten to leave. A public school dealing with the identical problem, with identical goodwill from its staff, often doesn't have the spare hour a pastoral coordinator would need to run it down properly, amid everything else on their plate.

It's also worth naming that switching schools, especially at the primary-to-secondary transition, is harder on a kid than the decision matrix in a parent's head usually accounts for. Our kids already have a friend group, and possibly a school they're attached to because an older sibling went there, or simply because that's where their social world already lives. Those attachments are real constraints, not sentimentality to be overridden by a better fee structure or a better wellbeing framework on paper. The social conditions around a specific kid, who else is going, who they'd be leaving, whether they make friends easily or would be genuinely destabilised by losing a friend group, matter just as much as anything I might want to dictate from the outside. I've come to think it's worth asking your kid what they think, not just deciding for them, especially once they're old enough to have an opinion worth taking seriously. That doesn't mean their preference wins by default. Sometimes the school your kid wants, because that's where a friend is going, is off the table for reasons that have nothing to do with them, and there's no way to dress that up as anything other than a hard no. Kids survive worse than not getting the school their friend picked, but asking for a kid's input and then overriding it is still a real cost to them, not a formality you tick off on the way to the decision you'd already made.

Zooming out from all of it (sector, funding, ratios, feedback loops), none of that is actually the thing I believe matters most. A school is an opportunity, not a determinant. At best it's a set of guardrails that make a good outcome more likely; it's not the thing that produces the outcome. I think family matters more than any of it: what a kid sees modelled at home, how failure and conflict get handled at the dinner table, whether they feel safe and paid attention to, does more to shape how a kid turns out than which sector, or even which specific school, they end up in. A great school doesn't fix a chaotic home, and a mediocre school rarely derails a kid with a stable, engaged family behind them.

And that loops back to the first point: because every kid is different, nothing above dictates an outcome for any specific child. It's context for a decision, not a formula that guarantees a result. So the honest version of this whole exercise is: use the lenses above to make a reasonable choice, hold it loosely, and then keep showing up as a parent — that's carrying more of the weight than the choice of school ever will.

AI is the open question no school has answered

Artificial intelligence. This is a whole topic on its own, and for the purposes of this piece, anything more than a few sentences would be speculation. My baseline thought: kids need to learn how to learn, not just what the answer is, which is the same tension Section 4 raised, testing for an answer versus testing for how a kid got there. So the question is really Section 3's question again, pointed at something new: do this school's leaders and its teachers actually have a thesis on this, or are they, like most of us, still working it out?

All this is hard. So the thinking continues...

References

  1. Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services 2026, Table 4A (school funding by sector). ↩
  2. Australian Government Department of Education, "Schooling Resource Standard" and Better and Fairer Schools Agreement 2025–2034. ↩
  3. NSW Department of Education, "Resource Allocation Model", including equity loadings. ↩
  4. Catholic Schools NSW and the National Catholic Education Commission, funding explainers — csnsw.catholic.edu.au, ncec.catholic.edu.au. (Note: pre-2017, systems could instead elect to be funded on a system-wide "system weighted average" SES basis; that mechanism was retired when SES moved to a per-school basis, but dioceses still redistribute their pooled funding internally via their own needs-based arrangement.) ↩
  5. Independent Schools Australia, "Dispelling Myths". ↩
  6. ACARA, My School, and National Report on Schooling in Australia 2024, Ch. 9. ↩
  7. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Schools, 2025 (student-to-teacher ratios, enrolments). ↩
  8. NSW Department of Education, Staffing Agreement 2024–2029 (class-size targets and ceilings). ↩
  9. Independent Education Union NSW/ACT, "Sydney Catholic Schools Class Sizes", Newsmonth, February 2019. ↩
  10. This is a genuinely broad line of research rather than one person's finding — see, e.g., Black & Wiliam's formative-assessment work on feedback, and the wider literature on teacher–student relationships and achievement. John Hattie's Visible Learning meta-analyses are the most-cited attempt to rank these effects, but his specific effect-size rankings have drawn sustained methodological criticism (averaging effect sizes across very different study designs is contested, and his methodology and conduct have faced broader scrutiny more recently), so I'm deliberately not leaning on his numbers here; the underlying claim, that feedback and relationships matter a great deal, holds up well beyond any single source. ↩
  11. Alpha School / 2 Hour Learning, including "The Program" and "DreamLaunch" pages — alpha.school; see also Wikipedia, "Alpha School". ↩
  12. Benjamin Bloom, "The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring," Educational Researcher, 1984. ↩
  13. Edward Deci & Richard Ryan (2000), Self-Determination Theory. ↩
  14. Critical commentary on Alpha School: Robert Pondiscio, "Dear Alpha School: I Hope You're Right"; Natalie Wexler, "The Alpha School Debate"; Jared Cooney Horvath, National Education Policy Center, "The Price Kids Pay"; CNN, "Is AI schooling the future of education — or a risky bet?" ↩
  15. University of Sydney / Australian Educational Researcher, Zunica, Reid O'Connor & Cartwright (2025), private tutoring research. ↩
  16. AARE EduResearch Matters, "Out from the shadows: the billion dollar tutoring industry." ↩