Claims that Catholic schools in poorer dioceses like Wollongong have missed out on millions of dollars of public funding at the expense of their richer cousins in metropolitan areas, have been denied by the church.
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The claims were made in an ABC report titled How the Catholic school system takes from the poor to give to the rich, and suggested poorer Catholic schools had lost out on $2360 per student on average in the nine years from 2015 to 2023.
"From our perspective the ABC's analysis doesn't fully grasp the multi-faceted complexity of the funding model for non-government schools," a spokesman for The Catholic Education Diocese of Wollongong said.
"The reality is that students in regional and remote NSW Catholic schools receive substantially more funding than students in metropolitan areas and pay less in school fees, which acknowledges the particular challenges of these schools."
Citing leaked documents, the ABC report suggested hundreds of NSW Catholic schools were missing out under a scheme which takes funding from the system's poorer primary schools and gives it to richer ones.
The report authors say the scheme aims to keep fees low for families in wealthy parts of Sydney. This, it's claimed, comes at a hefty cost for low- and middle-income families in the system, who are asked to pay much higher fees than they should to make up the shortfall.
Catholic Schools NSW denied this, as well as assertions that My School data showed dozens of low- and middle-SES (socio-economic status) schools were charging parents the same amount or more as their high-SES counterparts.
The report said about 280 schools - the vast majority low-SES - were collecting amounts far above parents' capacity to contribute.
The Catholic Education Diocese of Wollongong (CEDoW) has 38 systemic schools, 12 are in the Illawarra area. The CEDoW spokesman said Catholic schools in the Wollongong Diocese generally reflected a close to average SES profile as opposed to some dioceses with a larger SES range across their schools.
"This further supports our current position of common fee schedules," he said.
"We have always taken the view to set a consistent tuition fee cost that presents all of our Catholic schools as a 'low-fee' alternative for families seeking a Catholic or faith-based education.
"The government has acknowledged that the current model of assuming the amount of parent fee contributions as their 'capacity to contribute (CtC)' to non government schools is flawed and is under review."
About 80 per cent of government funding to non-government schools comes from the federal government.
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Agron Latifi
Wollongong born and bred. I love reporting about the Illawarra region and have been doing it for more than 20 years. I've moved into sport recently after covering the education round for the last five plus years for the Illawarra Mercury. It's been a great pleasure.
Wollongong born and bred. I love reporting about the Illawarra region and have been doing it for more than 20 years. I've moved into sport recently after covering the education round for the last five plus years for the Illawarra Mercury. It's been a great pleasure.
