BTW conrad, plenty of people with health insurance choose to go public for a variety of reasons - the big public hospitals are often simply better set up for really serious (read “expensive and unprofitable”) illnesses, and you don’t face most out-of-pocket expenses.

The public health care system for hospitals is pretty much means tested — who would use it when they have private health insurance that they essentially have to have after a certain income (I never have in my life time — even though I presume I could have waited for the public version when I needed it)? In addition, the place where we don’t usually use private health services even if insured (or at least the government pays for it making it defacto public) is for GPs, and guess what type of doctor is becoming more and more difficult to see?

In any case, this is another example where I wouldn’t mind seeing the data — I have no idea about it (unlike schools) — but given that people complain about public hospitals in almost every country (including in places where they are mainly public), its not clear to me that only public system are neccesarily better. I know people always point to the US here, but thats only a single country.

It’s not that big a deal, and besides, beggars can’t be choosers.

Spiros - Privacy concerns can be dealt with, though in this case where we want schools to recruit from low-income households privacy is a disadvantage. The bigger problem remains that while income may measure capacity to pay, it does not measure likely costs.

The tax office knows the parents’ income. The education department just has to ask the tax office, what is the median income of the following people? and then work out how much each school gets. Using median income takes care of anomalies like a few extremely high incomes.

I think I remember that the form said that the education and occupation questions were being asked on behalf of the Federal Government, but I could be wrong about that.

But in the end, I guess the point I’m making is that if you want to target parental SES it is best to target that directly (and as accurately as possible), because when people see wealthy private schools getting heaps of extra money under some ‘proxy’ SES formula they just know that something smells.

And while the postcode-based formula probably works OK for schools with a large proportion of truly low-SES kids, it can also go astray in that area. I remember a story in Canberra a few years back, when a new ‘alternative’ school, many of whose parents were generally quite low income, got a pretty poor funding deal under the current formula

Indeed it is, conrad - because it’s not means tested. That’s my point.

The state of the poor’s teeth in Australia, on the other hand …