Governance Through Community Partnerships: A Model for Public Funding of Private Schools in Australia

The provision of funds to non-government or private schools in Australia involves substantial sums of public monies, AUD$5,137m in 2001 (AEU 2002) from both state and federal governments. It has been, and still is, a public policy issue that generates considerable discussion and passion among the Australian community. This paper does not engage the ‘state aid’ debate, rather, it examines several different models of governance involved in the providing public funding for private schools. These models can be described in a variety of ways such as grants, subsidies, sponsorships, donations, joint investments, partnerships and contractual arrangements. The paper examines three of the more commonly considered models, grants, privatisation and community partnership, and explores how governance arrangements for each are typically treated in terms of relationships between partners, regulation and accountability.The term, ‘private’ is used to describe for-profit, not-for-profit, voluntary and other forms of service provision independent of the public sector. While this paper focuses on private provision of education services, it recognises that there are likely to be implications for public provision of these services in an environment where there is a limited total education budget.