By my sums, a public school education from Year 1 to Year 12 comes to about $144,000. A Catholic school comes to about $328,000, and a private school in Sydney to about $506,000. Those totals count extracurricular activities as well as tuition, and the activities turned out to matter more than I expected.
A friend and I got talking a while ago about what it actually costs to educate a child, and neither of us had a real answer. So I built a simple model for one child, Year 1 to Year 12, and put in the numbers I could find.
How We Worked It Out
We split the cost into two parts. The first is school costs, which depend on the type of school. The second is what a child does outside class, which we priced the same way in every scenario:
- Tutoring: $3,000 a year
- Music, such as piano: $2,500 a year
- Sport: $1,500 a year
- Uniforms, equipment and other odds and ends: $3,000 a year
That’s $10,000 a year, or $120,000 across twelve years.
Plenty of families don’t pay for private tutoring, so I also ran every scenario without it. Take out the $3,000 and the extras come to $7,000 a year, or $84,000 across twelve years.
For the private school we took one Sydney school’s fee schedule as a reference, and tuition over the twelve years came to $386,000. The Catholic school comes to $208,000. For public school we assumed $2,000 a year in school costs, or $24,000 in total. We haven’t counted donations, and private schools run plenty of events and activities, so the private figure is on the low side.
The Results
| Path | School costs | Total with tutoring | Total with no tutoring |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private school, Year 1 to 12 | $386,000 | about $506,000 | about $470,000 |
| Catholic school, Year 1 to 12 | $208,000 | about $328,000 | about $292,000 |
| Public school, Year 1 to 12 | $24,000 | about $144,000 | about $108,000 |
| Public primary, then private high school if the selective test doesn’t work out | $242,000 | about $341,000 | about $326,000 |
Private and public differ by $362,000, and all of it is tuition, because the extras are identical in the first three rows.
The Extras Are Most of the Public Bill
On the public path, about 83 per cent of the $144,000 is extras. Tutoring alone comes to $36,000 over twelve years, about 30 per cent of the extras. Public school itself is the cheap part of this picture.
Take tutoring out and extras are still about 78 per cent of the $108,000 public total. Music, sport and the odds and ends add up to $84,000 on their own, so the activities matter even for families who skip the tutor.
What We Were Curious About
The fourth row is the one I wanted to see. Under this plan, primary school is public, which lets me save. Then we sit the selective high school test. If it doesn’t work out, we look at private school from Year 7.
I also don’t like the idea of a tutoring treadmill, so I only put tutoring in Years 4 to 6 and Years 11 and 12. Music and sport stay as before. In NSW, applications for Year 7 selective entry open in Year 5, the placement test is early in Year 6, and the NSW Department of Education says the test is the only academic measure used.
If the test doesn’t work out, that path costs about $341,000. If it does, the same path stays public and comes to about $123,000, the cheapest of everything I priced with tutoring. That’s $218,000 riding on one test. I don’t know whether that little tutoring is enough to get a place, and the model doesn’t try to answer that.
Change the four numbers in the list above to match your own family and the totals will move a long way.
If you’re weighing school types, are private school holidays longer than public school holidays covers one practical difference, and there’s more in our Education category.