In Sharryn Brownlee’s experience, it’s when her children reach the later years of elementary school that many parents start asking each other the same question.
“Where are you going to send your kids to high school? Public or private?” she said.
For Brownlee, president of the New South Wales Central Coast Parents and Citizens Association (P&C), her decision was a no-brainer.
“You think, why would I pay all this money for them to get out of their area, to have friends who don’t live near them, when you can just as easily go to a local school (a public school) and be proud of where you are?” he said.
However, fathers like Brownlee seem to be becoming rarer.
The percentage of students enrolled in public schools has fallen to another record low, as thousands of students left the system in favor of the private sector, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data released on Thursday.
Over the past 10 years, independent school enrollments have grown at more than six times the rate of public schools, which fell last year for the first time since 2022, Guardian Australia analysis shows.
In total, in 2025, 4.1 million students were enrolled in schools across Australia, and 62.8% of them were enrolled in public schools, a decrease from 63.4% the previous year.
About 20% of students were enrolled in the Catholic system and 17.2% in independent schools, recording a combined increase of 21% between 2021 and 2025. At the same time, public school enrollment fell by 0.4%.
The number of students enrolled in public schools saw a 0.2% decline in 2025, with 6,109 fewer students in the public system compared to 2024. Another 35,021 students enrolled in private schools during the same period, an increase of 2.3%.
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Save Our Schools coordinator Trevor Cobbold said the “huge underfunding” of public schools was a key factor in the shift to the private sector.
“Underfunding means that public schools have far fewer human and material resources than overfunded private schools,” he said. “Public schools do the heavy lifting in education, but they don’t have the resources to do the work.”
Only Western Australia, Victoria and the ACT experienced growth in public school enrollment from 2024 to 2025, of 1%, 0.5% and 0.5% respectively. The biggest falls were in Tasmania (-1.7%), New South Wales (-0.9%) and South Africa (-0.9%).
Private schools now account for 38% of students in New South Wales, up from 30% in 2000, along with 41% in the ACT and 39% in South Africa.
Independent Schools NSW chief executive Margery Evans said much of the enrollment growth was in low- and medium-cost faith schools in Sydney’s fast-growing suburbs, including the south-west, Blacktown, Baulkham Hills and Hawkesbury.
“Parents may also be influenced by more practical considerations; more than 85% of independent schools are coeducational and two-thirds combine primary and secondary into a single school,” he said. “Many families prefer these types of environments for their children.”
For Brownlee, the public education system needs to “count their successes and what they are accomplishing” to set families back.
“I don’t think they’ve told those stories very well before,” he said. “And I don’t think there’s a lot of consistency among all the public schools: some did much better than others.
“Now (with increased funding) every school will be able to take on the Prime Minister’s Debate Challenge, every school will have extras, whereas in the past they didn’t.”
ABS figures also showed that the proportion of students staying in school until Year 12 rose annually for the first time since 2017, and the student-teacher ratio fell to a decades-low of 12.8 students per teacher.
Around 81.3% of students remained in school from Year 7 to Year 12, up from 79.9% in 2024, but still below the 2017 peak of 84.8%. Retention rates were significantly higher in independent schools (99.1%) than in public schools (75.4%).
In 2025 there were 283,611 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student enrollments, 3.2% more than in 2024 and representing 6.8% of all students.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said the increase in the number of students leaving secondary school was “good news” but there was “more work to do”.
“That’s what the agreements we’ve signed with every state and territory are about: fixing the funding of our schools and implementing reforms to increase the number of children finishing secondary school,” he said.
