Australian families are increasingly choosing to send their children to private schools.
As of 2025, 17% of Australian students attended private (also known as independent) schools. This is up from 13% in 2006.
In comparison, the proportion of students going to public (also called government) schools dropped from 67% in 2006 to 63% in 2025. Catholic school enrolments remained steady at around 20%.
What do these shifts mean for schools? National school attendance figures can tell us about the the overall population, but they may disguise different patterns in different areas.
So our new study looks at trends in New South Wales. We wanted to better understand where students are going to school and if there are differences between type of school and location.
Our research
We looked at the proportions of NSW students attending each school sector between 2008 and 2025. We concentrated on NSW, as it educates about 30% of the national school population.
We used publicly-available data on school attendance.
NSW also covers a vast range of different geographical areas. We split up the data so we could examine patterns by four locations: major cities, inner regional areas, outer regional, and remote or very remote areas.
We also examined the socioeconomic composition of schools in each sector, again split up by location. We were interested to see whether trends in the socioeconomic composition of schools changed and whether any changes differed by location.
Socioeconomic advantage is made up of a range of factors, including parents’ education levels and occupations, family income and location.
More students going private
Just like the national figures, there was an overall increase in the proportion of students attending independent schools in NSW, mirrored by a decline for government schools.
In 2008, 66% of NSW students attended government schools and 15% attended independent schools. By 2025, government school attendance had declined to 62%, independent school attendance increased to 20%.
The greatest growth in independent school attendance was in inner regional areas, for example, Camden, Wagga Wagga, and Lismore. In these locations, attendance at independent schools increased by 7% since 2008. Attendance at government schools dropped by 9%.
While the largest proportion of students attending independent schools in NSW is still in major cities, inner regional areas are catching up.
In remote and very remote locations there are few independent schools. Students here mostly attend government schools (around 80%) with the remaining students attending Catholic schools.
Location matters
School sector socioeconomic composition also differed depending on location.
On average, more advantaged students go to schools in major cities, rather than in regional, rural or remote areas. This is regardless of the sector.
This pattern could be driven by the commonly used “Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage” that we used to represent socioeconomic composition of schools. This measure includes location as one indicator of educational advantage.
Within each location, however, government schools had the lowest average socioeconomic rating, followed by Catholic schools. Independent schools educated the most advantaged students.
What’s happening to public and private schools?
Our analysis showed declines in socioeconomic advantage of students attending government schools in all locations except major cities.
On average, the socioeconomic background of students in metropolitan government schools did not change much over 18 years.
The socioeconomic composition of Catholic schools also stayed relatively stable overall, though increased in remote locations.
But the overall socioeconomic composition of independent schools in major cities, inner regional and outer regional areas declined between 2012 and 2025. Declines were larger in areas outside of the cities.
This is because we are now seeing independent schools educating students from more similar backgrounds to those attending Catholic schools.
While it seems unexpected, this result makes sense if the students leaving government schools for independent schools are largely from middle-income families, attending private schools with lower fees.
What does other research say?
Our results align with other Australian research, showing most government schools outside of cities are educating the most disadvantaged students in the country.
These results also show schools within each sector may not be comparable across all locations.
For example, government schools in inner Sydney will likely educate students from completely different socioeconomic backgrounds compared with government schools in Dubbo, Forbes or Moree.
What else do we need to know?
While this research provides a more detailed view of school attendance patterns around NSW, we were still limited by the type of data published by the national education reporting authority.
For example, we couldn’t split up the data into high schools and primary schools. This may reveal different trends since data shows students are more likely to go to private school for high school.
We also know rural and regional towns can differ greatly from each other, but they come under the same label in the bureau of statistics data we use. So these types of nuances are missing from our analyses.
What does this mean?
Previous research has also shown students who leave government schools are likely to be from more socioeconomically advantaged families.
In extreme cases, if many advantaged students leave some schools in favour of other schools, over time, it can lead to a system where advantaged and disadvantaged students are grouped into completely different schools.
While families of course have a right to choose what is best for their child, this can have an impact at a broader level.
There are many reasons families might choose a private school for their children. While our research cannot speak to this question, it does show us that school attendance patterns are changing in NSW. Understanding why we are seeing an increasing drift of students out of government schools and into private schools is an important next step.
