News
The government is yet to compel private schools to publish their principals’ salaries, despite concerns that taxpayers are supporting packages up to $1 million a year. By Julie Hare.
Private schools’ million-dollar principals
Only eight of Australia’s 2900 non-government schools must publicly report how much they pay their principals, and critics of the federal government’s funding for private schools are demanding increased transparency and accountability.
Australia is one of the few countries in the world where taxpayers subsidise non-government schools, including high-fee privates. Queensland is the only state that requires any of them – specifically, its eight grammar schools – to release detailed financial reports.
The reports that are publicly available reveal remunerations for private-school principals are in some cases more than triple those of their state counterparts, and rising sharply. Brisbane Grammar School’s head, Anthony Micallef, received a total package of $734,000 last year – $100,000 more than he was paid in 2023.
The Rockhampton Grammar School’s Phillip Moulds earnt $680,000, significantly more than Jacinda Euler, head of the high-achieving Brisbane Girls Grammar School. Other schools paid their principals between $450,000 and $550,000.
The heads of large public high schools tend to earn about $200,000, with the highest salaries close to $250,000.
States and territories provide the majority of funding for public schools and a small portion for private schools. These non-government schools also derive somewhere between 5 and 15 per cent of their funding from the federal government, while 70-80 per cent typically comes from student fees and the remainder from donations and investment income. On top of this, some collect generous philanthropic gifts.
Since 2022, it has been mandatory for all non-government schools to provide financial information to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC). However, information about executive salaries is provided as total expenditure, not itemised, and often without specifying how many people are in executive roles.
As more students shift to the private system, the cost to taxpayers continues to escalate. Between 2019 and 2024, enrolments in public schools rose by just 1 per cent and in the Catholic system by 6.6 per cent, according to the Bureau of Statistics. Enrolments in independent schools over the same period increased by 18.5 per cent. In the financial year to mid 2025, the federal government directed more than $19 billion to non-government schools, up 38 per cent from $13 billion in 2019/20.
The federal education minister, Jason Clare, has promised to impose more accountability and transparency conditions on independent schools for several years, but no steps have been taken so far. A public dashboard is under development, but there are no details about how much financial information will be required.
Last year, the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) attempted to introduce stricter reporting requirements via a review of the legislation covering non-government schools, section 83C of the New South Wales Education Act. The initial guidelines proposed an investigation into how private schools determined executive salaries, to ensure they did not go above “reasonable market value”.
In its submission to the review, The Australia Institute, a left-leaning think tank, provided a damning critique of high salaries in the private sector.
“For these salaries to constitute an investment in education spending there would need to be a correlation between the salary received by a head of school and the educational outcomes of that school, but that is demonstrably untrue,” the submission said.
The think tank advised that all private schools, as a condition of receiving government funding, should publish an itemised list of key personnel and their remuneration.
The final NESA report was substantially scaled back from its original intent, however, indicating a reluctance to take on lobbyists and supporters of the private school sector, says Australia Institute co-chief executive Richard Denniss.
“I would say there’s zero political appetite for that fight. It’s no accident that there’s no GST on private school fees, or accountability on how public money is spent within private schools. Neither major party wants to be the first to have a fight with this vocal interest group.”
Asked why the final report was watered down, a NESA spokesperson says NSW has the “strongest and most transparent system in the country for monitoring non-government school income and asset use”.
While NSW schools are required to publish annual reports that include the percentage spent on salaries, there is no requirement to publish the remuneration of its executives.
NESA can, however, “direct a school to provide specific information, including about salaries, if there is a concern a school may have operated for profit,” says the spokesperson.
A salary benchmarking report leaked to The Sydney Morning Herald last year revealed some unidentified principals had received remuneration of between $460,000 and $1,034,000. The report was based on data from 2021 and pay packets have likely increased significantly since.
The school with the highest annual student fees in the country – Victoria’s Geelong Grammar, which charges more than $55,380 per day-student and almost double that for boarders – reported that its 14 executives earnt a combined $4,390,379 in 2024, an average of $313,600. The school received $11 million in government subsidies on top of the $55 million it collected in fees. We only know that total because since 2022 that has been the minimum reporting requirement to the ACNC. A number of schools provide only the total amount but not how many senior staff are included. Others have still not provided last year’s annual reports.
Dr Paul Kidson, a former independent school principal and an expert in educational leadership at Australian Catholic University, attributed the high pay packets for some principals to “a competitive market”.
“As a collective, [independent schools] are a very diverse group. Very high-fee elite schools operate on a very different set of metrics,” Kidson says. “What amount of pay principals receive is a reasonable question to ask, but it’s difficult to know where to land on an answer for that.”
Kidson argues that the legislative responsibilities for private schools, especially boarding schools, make high salaries understandable. “If you have 500 people who live, breathe and sleep at your school, it is a type of responsibility that not everybody wants to take on and non-government school principals have, despite what some advocates of public education would say, a different series of responsibilities legislatively,” he says.
The problem with having so much money, however, is that schools have to spend it because they are non-profit. As a result, their excess money is often ploughed into things of dubious educational benefit, such as architect-designed buildings, Olympic-grade sporting facilities, boatsheds, verdant grounds – and executive salaries.
“There’s zero evidence to suggest that sandstone buildings, electric elevators for your grand piano or indoor equestrian centres do anything to improve educational outcomes or productivity,” Denniss says. “But they make Australians know that some schools are much better funded than others.”
In 2022, The King’s School in Sydney’s North Parramatta made headlines with the planned installation of a plunge pool on the grounds of principal Tony George’s residence. There were already two pools – 50 and 25 metres – on the campus.
The NSW school regulator intervened, forcing the school to cease construction, over concerns it was using public funds. Critics say it is impossible to know what is paid for out of which pile of money.
Andy Mison, president of the Australian Secondary Principals’ Association, describes the lack of transparency on private school spending – including million-dollar salaries for principals – as “a rort on all of us, including the people who send their kids to those schools”.
“We are subsidising private industry, while also contributing to increasing residualisation of poor, disadvantaged kids in the public sector.”
At Canberra’s Radford College, the city’s third most expensive school, news of a fee hike of up to 23 per cent on November 4 stunned parents. That increase will raise fees to nearly $26,000 a year, alongside increases to two compulsory levies.
At a meeting with angry parents in late November, the school’s chair, Vicki Williams, blamed falling government contributions, poor financial forecasting, including debt levels and interest, and the flow-on effects of rising teacher salaries in the NSW and ACT public systems. She also cited a federal policy, Capacity to Contribute, that is reducing subsidies based on family incomes. In Radford’s case, an unexpected jump in the wealth of its parental cohort meant the school lost $2 million in funding.
“Our government funding per student has declined 37 per cent since 2018. This decline in revenue has meant that, to support our excellence in education offering and to provide the facilities and resources that support that, we need to turn to school fees to pay for that,” Williams told the meeting, in a transcript seen by The Saturday Paper.
In 2024, the school had total revenues of $53 million, or $24,411 per student – about $5000 more than kids at the nearby public Lyneham High School, according to the My School website.
The way the school communicated the fee hike, and the fact some parents are now in search for another school in 2026, prompted the Anglican Church on Wednesday to announce it was taking the matter seriously and would undertake an independent review.
One parent, who asked not to be identified, described the leadership and governance of the school as “exceedingly arrogant”.
“What they don’t understand is that there’s a lot of middle-class parents who really believe in having a private education for their kids, and they sacrifice everything for that. For these parents, this fee commitment is as big as their mortgage. That’s the seriousness of the decision for them, and now they’re just being treated like accounting entries.”
Richard Denniss sees the school’s priorities quite differently, arguing that the main selling point of private school education is status and the “uncomfortable truth” is that principals getting paid $1 million is a signifier of a school’s elite standing and funding.
“The point of expensive private schools is to show how rich they are. The irony is, of course, the taxpayer helps them in that goal.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 13, 2025 as "Million-dollar principals".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
