ABSTRACT
More than one-quarter of Australian school children are in ‘private’ schools. This is the highest proportion in any Anglo-American country; furthermore, while elsewhere the private sector is either static or declining, in Australia it has been growing (UNESCO, 1989). During the 1980s the private share in Australia grew from about 20 per cent to 27 per cent, the highest since public systems were established in the late nineteenth century. By far the greater part of the private sector are the Catholic schools which educate just under 20 per cent of all school children, most, but not all, the children of Catholic parents. It is the non-Catholic component, however, that has contributed the greater part of the private growth in the 1980s. Elite schools catering for the upper part of the social order grew in numbers and size also, and a bevy of newer sorts of private school were established, ranging from those supported by ethnic and fundamentalist religious groups to schools practising various sorts of alternative education.
