Teach the children...: a history of the school education work of the Sydney Anglican Church with special reference to the Sydney Anglican Schools Corporation
Creators: name: Anderson, Donald George
Publisher: name: Macquarie University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 399999
subject: Other education not elsewhere classified

description: The history of the Sydney Diocesan Council called the Sydney Anglican Schools Corporation (called The Council for the Promotion of Sydney Church of England Diocesan Schools in 1947) over the period 1944 to 1991 demonstrates that the Sydney Anglican Church’s capacity to maintain schools that charged moderate fees was inseparably linked to two major factors. First, to be able to establish and successfully govern such schools an effective diocesan organisation was needed. Secondly for the organisation’s work to prosper, the provision of generous state-aid was indispensable.
The Sydney Anglican Church from 1788 to 1882 was able to provide many elementary schools, but when the Colony of New South Wales withdrew funding in 1882 most of these schools closed. The Diocese lacked the ‘organisational machinery’ to be able to defend and maintain its schools against their many critics. In 1919 the Sydney Diocesan Synod established a Board of Education with the brief to amongst other tasks which included the tasks of ‘acquire, establish and govern’ schools. The efforts of the Board in this area were largely unsuccessful and as a consequence, Archbishop H.W.G. Mowll and Archdeacon S.M. Johnstone created in the early 1940s a school’s sub-committee of the Board of Education that subsequently became a Synod Council charged with expanding the diocesan schools’ ministry.
Initially its work majored on the establishment of kindergartens in parish halls. That initially appeared to be successful, but by 1956 all these schools had closed. The Council’s long-term major achievement was to be the establishment of a network of primary and secondary schools. Such an achievement involved the Council in many mistakes and disappointments, which provoked pointed diocesan scrutiny. With the re-introduction of state-aid in the 1960s the Council was better able to assume control of a number of existing small schools and in the early 1960s it sought to establish totally new schools (not always successfully).
By the late 1980s, however, the Council possessed a stable experienced diocesan organisation that together with the continuing provision of state-aid provided the Council with opportunities to enlarge its small network of schools. With these key ingredients in place, a number of significant individuals, namely Alan Langdon, Ian Mears and John Lambert, enabled the now Sydney Anglican Schools Corporation in the early 1990s to embark on a programme of expansion – ten schools being added in the period 1995 to 2009. The key factors that made possible this dramatic expansion were the provision of state-aid and the increasingly effective and well-managed diocesan educational organisation (the Corporation) that was able to capitalise on the growing desire of many parents to enrol their children in well managed Anglican schools which charged moderate-fees.