One of my work colleagues has recently moved to Sydney, and was asking me about schools. Public? Selective? Catholic? Private? The second greatest topic of conversation in our blessed city after housing. There are no good answers; I think the most I can contribute is a biased, almost completely unresearched and probably fundamentally incorrect take on why it's such a mess. In the before times, there were three systems. If you were rich, you went to a fancy private school; in such times, this was tautological. All private schools were fancy. Otherwise, if you were Catholic you went to a 'systemic' Catholic school for a smaller amount of money, and if you were neither rich nor Catholic you went to your local government school. Then, the systemic Catholic schools started running out of money as the nuns and monks aged out and they couldn't afford to actually pay teachers, so they extorted the government of the time into funding them since it would be cheaper to do this tha