I think this is like admitting defeat. It’s saying ‘there is no way we can make the public system as good as the private system so we’re just going to take over the private schools’. Private education is stupidly expensive. I had a client who used to pay more than my annual salary to send her kids to a private school. Parents are selecting private education because they see value in the calibre of education there.

If you can improve the public education quality to the point where it is on-par with private, parents will cease to see the value in paying up to half a Million dollars sending their kids to private school. Our family has done the equivalent of this. We moved to the catchment of a top-tier public school to give our kids the best public education options available. There is as much disparity between public schools as there is between public/private. I believe there’s a good middle-ground to be had where more academic-focused public schools are created. The few that exist now are so difficult to get into that loads of parents who want their kids to get a great education (we applied but our kid didn’t make the grade) aren’t qualifying.

There will always be a percentage who want some of the things private education offers (like religion), but enough will start sending their kids public that the remaining private students become a rounding error.

I’m also not comfortable with the idea of the government effectively saying either of the following:

1. [To parents] If you decide to send your child to private school, they stop being entitled to the education funding you are paying taxes for.
2. [To schools] You no longer own this school, we are taking over your private property.