Australian school leaders are navigating a widening resource gap every day. A new national coalition wants to change the system that created it.
Schools for All Australia launched publicly on 1 September 2026, following a webinar attended by more than 500 educators, researchers and policymakers. The response, its founders say, reflects how urgently the school equity debate needs to move from rhetoric to structural reform.
New analysis of the 2026 NAPLAN results shows Year 9 students from disadvantaged backgrounds now trail their peers by almost eight years in numeracy. A 2024 Australian Education Union (AEU) report found the average public school is underfunded by $2,509 per student. At the same time, 56.3% of private schools receive more combined government funding per student than comparable public schools.
Co-convenor Mark Morris, a parent from Toowoomba, Queensland, put the question plainly: “Why do we have an increasingly segregated school system? Why hasn’t somebody done something already?”
For school leaders at under-resourced public schools, this inequity appears in staffing decisions and programs that get cut. It shows up in students who cannot access the same opportunities as peers at better-resourced schools.
What Quebec’s school reform model shows Australian leaders
The coalition drew on an international case study at its launch: Quebec, Canada. Less than a decade ago, the province faced conditions closely mirroring Australia’s. A large private sector was drawing students and resources away from public schools.
Stéphane Vigneault, a community organiser who led the Quebec campaign, told the webinar his movement did not target families who chose private schools. It focused instead on shifting public opinion toward a model where all schools operate within a common, fully funded network. Schools that are already well-resourced and decline to join would lose public funding.
The campaign has advanced further than many expected. “We are now just one vote away from changing the system,” Vigneault said.
For Australian school leaders, the Quebec story shows that entrenched, sector-divided systems can be reformed. The starting point is public consensus.
Why school segregation is an operational problem for K-12 decision-makers
The funding debate is often framed as a political one. For K-12 decision-makers, school segregation and inequitable resourcing are operational realities.
Adrian Piccoli is a former New South Wales Education Minister and Honorary Professor at the UNSW School of Education. He argued that concentrated disadvantage, not individual school quality, drives poor outcomes. Schools absorbing the highest-needs cohorts on the least funding face the hardest conditions.
“There are a lot of kids that can’t afford to go to a faith-based private school in Australia,” Piccoli said.
He warned that the funding debate too easily crowds out wider questions. Those include the social and economic consequences of residential segregation. Where a child lives increasingly determines what school they can access.
“If we designed an Australian education system today, we wouldn’t design it the way it is,” Piccoli said.
Australia ranks among the OECD’s most inequitable school systems for resource allocation, according to the Australian Secondary Principals Association. State and territory ministers have already united in a historic push for full public school funding, but advocates say structural inequity remains entrenched.
How early intervention can shift Australia’s school equity trajectory
Pasi Sahlberg, Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Melbourne in Victoria, described Australia’s schools as “a hybrid system which operates in different ways.” Full funding within a common network is “something we need, but difficult to put in practice,” he said. “But we have to do something about it.”
Both Piccoli and Sahlberg nominated primary schools as the logical entry point for reform. It is where funding disparities compound earliest and where intervention has the highest leverage on long-term outcomes.
Research consistently shows that private schools hold a structural funding advantage that flows into capital works, staffing and resources. Public schools, meanwhile, absorb the highest-needs enrolments on less.
Every child, every school, every opportunity
Schools for All Australia is positioning itself as a break from decades of adversarial sector debate. Its Call to Action – every child, every school, every opportunity – is designed to bring all sectors to the table: public, Catholic and independent.
The coalition includes the Australian Learning Lecture, which partially funded a group visiting Ontario, Canada, a province operating a more integrated school system. Co-convenor John Bush has supported research and advocacy on school segregation for years.
NAPLAN gaps are widening. Per-student funding remains skewed against public schools. For K-12 decision-makers, the school equity challenge is impossible to ignore. As Vigneault put it: “What seems stuck can be unstuck.”
The Schools for All Australia website is now live. Further public webinars and sector outreach are planned.