Each year a new generation of parents find themselves hunched over the kitchen table asking themselves the same question: do we send the kids private or public?
They crunch the numbers, tear up the budget, eyeball the monthly spend. Some even wonder if now’s the time to ask the grandparents for a little help.
After hours, days, and weeks of deliberation, many mums and dads decide the decent local public school is the better option.
Others, swayed by promises of academic excellence and glittering social opportunity, choose the path of independent education.
Parents with children in private schools will often sing the praises of the superior facilities – from heated swimming pools to indoor volleyball complexes, tennis courts, sports fields and music studios – to justify the annual fees in the tens of thousands of dollars. They swoon over the networking opportunities that come with having their kids rub shoulders with the offspring of politicians and CEOs.
But what you rarely hear about is private school regret: Those parents who splash out on elite schools only to realise they shouldn’t have bothered.
Maybe it turns out the local co-ed was just as good as the shiny private school you spend an hour a day driving back and forth to. Or perhaps the values of your son’s elite all-boys college are turning him into someone you no longer recognise.
Mark Morris, from the Gold Coast, , is one dad who realised very early on that private school wasn’t the right option for his family. So he pulled his son and daughter out, enrolled them in public schools and never looked back.
Mark, a 42-year-old business coach and HR executive, was drawn in by the excellent sports facilities when he chose to enrol his son, now five, into A.B Paterson College on the Gold Coast – where annual fees are almost AU$11,000 (£5,700 or US$7,400).
‘The facilities definitely appealed because we were drawn in by the fact that my wife and I both want our kids to play sport. As with many private schools, the facilities at A.B Paterson are good,’ he told Daily Mail .
‘That was absolutely a factor – it looks nice, we were sucked in, the facility is nice, it’s got its own pools.’
The non-denominational private school was also just 500 metres from their house at Arundel.
Mark thought sending his son and daughter to a co-ed private school would be a good choice, and assumed it would be nothing like his own bad experience as a scholarship student at a private boys’ school in Brisbane in the 1990s.
The father-of-two winces as he reflects on those years.
‘It was terrible. In the late 1990s, an all-boys elite school in Brisbane was just horrible. The way they objectified girls, the way they treated each other, bullying was commonplace,’ he said.
‘You were nobody if you didn’t play rugby.’
Despite those misgivings, he enrolled his son in the Gold Coast private school’s early childhood centre from the age of two, believing a co-ed environment would be more progressive than the all-boys school he had attended more than 25 years earlier.
The fact it was non-denominational was another bonus.
‘We thought the elitism around private schools was the product of religion or being single sex,’ he said.
‘We thought the really snobby schools are the single-sex schools or your religious schools, so we thought we were making a more equitable, inclusive choice by going to a non-denominational, co-ed school. But it turns out they can be just as snobby.’
In 2023, Mark was preparing to enrol son in A.B Paterson’s prep school for the following year – only to receive an alarming note from the school principal.
The school was not prepared to allow his son to enrol the following year unless he cut his hair to a traditional short back and sides.
Mark’s son liked wearing his hair long in a bun. He wasn’t a feminine boy by any means; instead he sported the kind of hairdo made popular by David Beckham.
‘It wasn’t until the conversations at the school started that it really became a thing,’ he said.
‘We had never really thought about it. We kind of just let him be himself.’
The school wasn’t prepared to compromise, leading the family to appeal to Independent Schools Queensland and the Queensland Human Rights Commission.
The Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal in May declined to force the school to accept a male student with long hair and Mr Morris concluded paying $25,000 in legal fees wasn’t worth the effort.
The Morrises, a Millennial couple, last year withdrew their son from A.B. Paterson College. They pulled their eight-year-old daughter out at the same time, anticipating similar problems.
They initially home-schooled them before moving to Toowoomba, two hours’ drive from the Gold Coast, where they enrolled them in a public school.
Joanne Sheehy, the principal of A.B. Paterson College, said Mr Morris had agreed with its uniform policy when he enrolled his son.
‘Like other private schools, we have a uniform policy, which is intended to encourage all students to be well-presented, respectful, and unified,’ she said.
‘Whilst there are obvious differences applicable to each gender, clear standards of presentation are expected of both male and female students.
‘Relaxation of the policy has the effect of undermining its purpose and the expectations of all the parents who enrol their children at the college.’
For Mark, it wasn’t simply a dispute about permitted hair length. The ‘hair code’ raised broader concerns about the school being stuck in the past, especially when it comes to personal expression.
‘There’s multiple facets and it got deeper the more we kind of got into it,’ he said.
‘Private schools, they’re much more sexist, effectively, than public schools. Public schools are a lot more inclusive and equitable, whereas private schools have much more rigid gender norms and expectations around many things – not only uniforms and appearance standards but also access to activities.’
The HR adviser made the point that banning a male from having long hair would be inappropriate in a workplace and expose an employer to litigation. However, it was somehow acceptable in a school setting.
‘It baffled me that in a workplace we would never tell a girl that she couldn’t wear trousers or a boy that he couldn’t have his hair long,’ he said.
‘But in a school, we think it’s okay? It didn’t make sense to me that we have this one set of rules for workplaces and one set of rules for schools.’
Despite being a non-denominational school, A.B. Paterson College requires students to also adhere to strict boys and girls dress codes.
Mark also recently prepared a report on private schools on the Gold Coast in his capacity as an associate director with Barcley Consulting, which made him question keeping his children in the independent system.
‘A lot of private schools restrict activities according to what they expect a kid to do according to their gender,’ he said.
‘For example, they would only have netball for girls but not boys, they’d only have n Rules football for boys but not girls.’
By contrast, Mark’s report found access to activities at public schools was ‘a lot more equitable’: boys could play netball and girls could play football.
Despite the old-fashioned views at private schools, they have grown in popularity in over the past few decades.
Independent Schools , which represents schools like A.B. Paterson College, produced data showing 716,800 students were enrolled in private schools in 2023. That’s 18 per cent of the school-aged population.
Back in 1970, just four per cent of children were in private schools.
After his own experience of a private school, Mr Morris said he had also come to resent the elitist values they espoused, whether they were single sex or co-ed.
‘We now realise it wasn’t worth the money,’ he said.
‘They weren’t really getting a better education – it’s almost like you’re buying a ticket into that circle of social elites and that’s not how we wanted our kids to get ahead in life.
‘Why are we paying fees to go to this school that not only disrespects kids and doesn’t value individual differences?’
The other side of the debate…
We pulled our son out of a public school and sent him private because the class sizes were too big and he was playing up. It was the best decision we ever made
By an anonymous private school mum from the UK
Every time I see my son’s fabulous school I catch my breath. It’s a beautiful, 200-year-old building surrounded by fields, with its own chapel and boarding houses where Thomas* stays from Monday to Friday.
My husband Michael* and I went to public schools so we didn’t even consider going private at first, but within a few years of Thomas, now 16, starting primary school we were disillusioned.
Thomas is a bright boy, but by eight years old he was the class clown. There were too many children in his group for one teacher to manage effectively and not enough focus on discipline, so he could get away with not paying attention. We realised that if we didn’t do something, he would fall in with the wrong crowd.
Michael and I live in a lovely five-bedroom house and are very comfortably off, but we are not millionaires. So it was a big decision to go private. We drew up a spreadsheet to work out what we could afford.
At the moment we are paying just under £40,000 (AU$77,000) for Thomas’ education and just over £20,000 (AU$38,000) for his sister Amelia*, who is 12. There’s another £11,000 (AU$21,000) for their younger sister Katie*, six. It adds up. We have another daughter – Scarlett, one – who will be starting in three years, although Thomas will have left by then.
Is it worth it? Absolutely. We feel we are doing everything to help them in their schooling and for their future, that this gives them the edge, in terms of possibilities and connections. Of course, their schools’ academic results are fantastic, but their education is also designed to instil confidence, resilience and independence.
It’s down to simple things like shaking hands with teachers. When I first went to a job interview I was nervous about shaking people’s hands, but in the private sector this sort of worldly experience is instilled in children from the start.
The staff at Thomas’ school are wonderful, so communicative and open with parents and the discipline is strict. If the boys are not wearing uniform correctly or are disruptive in class – or even disorganised – they get ‘clearings’ which build up and mean a Friday night detention.
The school offers every sport you can imagine, from tennis to polo. There are chess clubs, choirs, the chance to learn a musical instrument.
As well as the usual skiing trips, there was a trip to Madagascar recently. Of course, you have to pay extra for these things, so we’re quite grateful that Thomas has not been too interested. One of the things he has most enjoyed is the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) activities in which they learn skills from the Navy, Army and Royal Air Force.
Amelia and Katie’s school is a much smaller prep school with fewer than 150 children. It’s gorgeous, set within parkland and, although this may sound like a cliché, it’s like a real family. Everyone is kind, the children are nurtured and when you drop them off – Amelia boards only two nights a week – you know they are safe. It’s not one of those schools that seems to ‘hothouse’ children purely for academic results.
One of the huge benefits is small classes – no more than 20 pupils. I can’t imagine what some state school teachers have to cope with in classes of 35 or 40. You must spend half your time disciplining one half, while the other half wants to learn.
Small classes are perfect for Amelia as she is not particularly academic. If she was in a large class, I think she’d hardly ever say a word. She has mild learning difficulties so she gets lots of learning support, even extra lessons to help build her confidence. There is no way she’d have that in the state system.
That’s not to say I hate state education. Most of my friends’ children are in state schools and I hear mixed reviews. Some love it, some hate it. Some have good results, some don’t. It’s probably fine if you are clever – or rich enough to buy a house in a good school’s catchment area.
Thomas has said he wants to leave his school after his GCSEs this year and transfer to a local state college for A-levels. It’s a huge relief financially, but perhaps it’s also time he had a little more ‘real world’ experience.
One of the (few) pitfalls of private education – particularly at such an elite school – is that it doesn’t give you a realistic world view. Thomas has some super-rich friends who are always jetting off to the Caribbean or the Alps for half term and we simply can’t keep up.
Having said that, I wouldn’t have changed his experience for the world. He’s had the best education money can buy and I’m relieved we can give the same to our girls.
As told to Jill Foster. Names have been changed.