It is becoming increasingly important to be collate accurate data on Christian schools - but we need your help!
Schools will have seen the summary of school 'affiliations' collated by Independent Schools Australia and widely used in analysis of independent schools -
The classifications used are based on the information held by the Commonwealth Department of Education. In turn, this is based on the data supplied by the School's 'Approved Authority' when they registered the school with the Department of Education. In many cases this would have been decades ago.
As a consequence the only real data on the composition of the independent school 'sector' is clearly misleading. The table above shows that there are only 159 'Christian' schools in Australia - we know that there are many more! These others could be contained within other 'affiliations' such as:
- Non-Denominational
- Baptist
- Inter-Denominational
- Presbyterian
- Pentecostal
- Assemblies of God
- Other Religious Affiliation, which includes Churches of Christ.
This under identification of Christian schools has resulted, quite recently in one example, in attempts to downplay and ignore the concerns of Christian schools over the years.
We are asking all member schools to ensure that they are identified and captured as 'Christian' schools. It is far more important to get a strong 'Christian school' constituency identified than dilute our status through breaking the data down to denominational levels.
Your school is able to change change you affiliation by contacting the Schools Approvals and Payments (SAP) Team via email at [email protected]. Simply have an authorised representative of the Approved Authority for the school contact the department and indicate that you want the 'affiliation' of the school changed to 'Christian School' on all Deparmental records and for that description to be used in all data and statistical analysis.
Thank you for your assistance with this.