Community Providers of a Public Service
Confusing conceptions of 'private' and 'public' education misrepresent the fact that
the Catholic education sector is a community
provider of a public service.
Catholic schools are provided comprehensively across geographic areas and,
like government schools, educate students from across the socio-economic
spectrum. Catholic education complements rather than competes with public
education.
Catholic education explicitly educates
students for engagement in civic and public life while attending to their
intellectual and faith development. High expectations and priority are
placed on service to the community, and a firm commitment is made to
nurturing school communities that not only encourage and celebrate
intellectual achievement and academic excellence but also participation,
leadership and achievement in other fields - sports, the arts, citizenship
activities.
Catholic schools also strongly recognise
their responsibility to facilitate and support the development of
communities of people - students, families, staff - who share in and
support the growth and well-being of one another. Our schools aim to
ensure that the notion of the 'common good' is a worthy ideal that has
established its credentials through sustained and meaningful learning
experiences within the school community.
Catholic schools rightly
claim a special solicitude towards poor and needy individuals and
families. Most primary and secondary schools have fee structures which are
responsive to the financial status/capacity of their families. Exemptions
and concessions due to financial hardship are generously granted, and
parents are offered a number of methods of paying fees to reduce their
financial burden and to assist in financial planning. In addition, at the
system/sector level, the CECV allocates recurrent government grants on a
'needs-based' funding formula that favours low socio-economic school
communities. Allocations of government capital grants are weighted to
lower socio-economic regions and schools, and in the period 1998-2003
internally derived supplementary capital funds have been established and
distributed to needy schools.
As noted by the Congregation for Catholic
Education, 'Catholic schools have come into being not as a private
initiative but as an expression of the reality of the Church, having by
its very nature a public character. Therefore. Catholic schools,
like state schools fulfil a public role, for their presence guarantees
cultural and educational pluralism and, above all, the freedom and right
of families to see that their children receive the sort of education they
wish for' (1988: 16 & 17).