First, let me ask you a question - Are you a teacher in any Australian school?

Secondly, you have just pontificated on schooling in Australia - so, my second question is, if an article came out with different conclusions (with which you disagreed) would you be amenable to being force to read it as you are in the class of people who pontificates on schooling in Australia.

There are good private schools and there are good public schools. There are bad private schools and there are bad public schools. What makes them good or bad is a function of the school administration, teachers and families involved in those schools.

All are interrelated and how they handle "problem" students is very dependent on the three groups. I have seen both private and public schools that do not handle such matters well and the result is that everything (in time) goes to hell in a handcart.

But I have also seen schools completely turned around by a change of administration, change of teachers and a more involved family community. This has affected both public and private schools.

You negativity toward private schools (comment about partial government funding) doesn't seem to recognise that if private schools closed down the public school system would be so overwhelmed that it would no longer have any hope of coping.

My own children have been at both public and private schools. I have even been on the school committee for the public school so I got a direct management insight into the operation of the school and the processes required for dealing with "problem" children. At times, it was more problems with parents than children, at other times it was problems in the families which could be mitigated by giving them appropriate help and at other times it was just related to recalcitrant and stubborn children that their own families had difficulty with and the families were supporting the school actions in relation to their children and finally there were problems with the teachers themselves and their interactions with specific children.

If there is no cooperation between schools and the families involved in wanting to develop the children to be their best, then failures will increasingly occur.

Your comment about selective schools misses one salient point, children are not all the same. In Victoria, we used to have trade oriented schools, which were done away with. We now have little opportunity to have students who are interested in practical fields to be specifically educated in those areas. The education model is to have all students head for higher education and big debts.

I have a grandson who is autistic and is being educated in the private school sector where there is facilities for him to progress. The local public schools don't have those facilities and hence he would be on the scrapheap. However, there are public schools around who only take the "best" students and pride themselves on having great education standards. If you don't qualify, you'll have problems getting in.

What the solutions are is contentious and many just blame one sector or another for the problems (private/public) without thinking about the broader community aspects and the benefit to students. Teaching is not a highly regarded profession and that in itself brings about structural problems of all sorts. We then have various political interferences that want to control the specific social education across all schools, irrespective of any school community feedback.