‘Keeping up with the Joneses’: The factors pushing families to private schools

More families than ever are choosing private schools based on campus appearances and top-end facilities, with new data also showing children are having a greater say in school selections.

Two decades ago, 42 per cent of parents surveyed by industry body Independent Schools Queensland said their decision was “heavily influenced” by a school’s external appearance and facilities.

This year, that figure jumped to 73 per cent.

Associate Professor Emma Rowe, a leading researcher in education funding and school choice, said she wasn’t surprised that younger generations of parents were more likely to be influenced by facilities.

“Parents are incentivised to make particular choices ... it can be a lot about the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ sort of mentality,” Rowe said.

“If you do walk into a school and it has all these amazing facilities, of course it’s going to be really influential.”

Collating responses from more than 3300 independent school parents, the ISQ report also showed 54 per cent were “highly influenced” by their child’s opinion.

“Conversations with colleagues at work or in other social circles are also having a greater influence over parents’ school decisions,” ISQ chief executive Chris Mountford said.

He said family and friends still held the largest sway over independent school families, with more than seven in 10 listing it as one of the three most influential factors in their school choice.

Second among those factors were open days and formalised school visits, accounting for 58 per cent of families’ top three.

Rowe said families seeking schools tailored to their child’s needs, such as accessible infrastructure and special needs education support, or specialised programs and facilities, had fewer choices in the public sector.

“Sports is a good example because we’re actually hindering a lot of our young people from excelling because we simply don’t provide the facilities,” Rowe said.

“Students don’t get footy fields, they don’t get running tracks, athletic fields – they don’t get that stuff if they’re not in an independent school.”

Many Brisbane private schools boast a range of top-end facilities, such as Brisbane Grammar School’s new STEAM precinct, which opened last year and was estimated by the school to have cost about $80 million.

Rowe said long-standing funding agreements between governments and independent schools, such as capital funding, enabled these schools to invest in infrastructure.

She said even equal-access infrastructure and program funding initiatives, such as the Queensland government’s Olympic funding program offering $5 million to schools for sports facilities, did not cater to state schools because the application cost was too high.

“Principals were saying to me, ‘yeah, we have to invest $10,000 into applying, so that’s just the application, we don’t know if we’re going to be successful’,” Rowe said.

A thriving independent sector wasn’t necessarily a good thing, with the flipside being a “ridiculous” level of underfunding in state schools, Rowe said.

“Teachers are walking off the job, and a lot of it relates to large classroom sizes, as well as very little support,” she said.

“I’ve talked to principals, and they’re experiencing major disrepair in their facilities.”

A state-commissioned report released last Thursday listed $441 million in outstanding repair and maintenance work needed by Queensland state schools, which Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek said exceeded the 2025-26 repair budget of $200 million.

He said at the time that up to one-third of state schools had outstanding structural issues.

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