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.

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’........

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