The surprising history of Anglican schools

More Anglican schools have vanished, some existing for decades, than exist today. That’s part of the complex history of Anglican Schools in Sydney, which was revealed by historian David Hastie at a Moore College library showcase event last week.

The new wave of Anglican schools since the 1980s that have contributed to the shift towards non-government schooling, and a previous long period of Anglicans backing the public school system for all but a few students, featured in Hastie’s story of policy reversals instigated by a couple of visionary Bishops in particular.

Hastie, the Associate Dean of of Education Development at Alphacrucis College, researching the history of Anglican schooling, has realised that the official documents don’t even capture which schools existed and asked his listeners to flesh out the history with their stories.

“From a purely theological viewpoint, schools are immensely complex and immensely complex artefacts of history and society,” Hastie stated up front, explaining that his talk would not be theological – unusual for a talk in the Marcus Loane lecture theatre at Moore Theological College. Hastie listed a range of types of theology advanced for schools: “drawing from the incarnation post-resurrection, social restoration theologies, covenantal theologies, theologies particularly to do with the family, more old covenant than new, truth be told; soteriological theology or theology of the atonement – also, of course, evangelism – however, only recently and by far the least. So no theology is actually given primacy in the historical rationale for, or functioning of, Anglican schools in the historical record more of a potpourri that’s sprinkled through the history, complexly woven into several other factors and purposes of schooling.”

Without a consistent language to describe schooling, much of Hastie’s lecture uncovered a lack of consistency in structure. Instead, Hastie described five very different eras with widely divergent visions.

The Colonial Era: 1788 to 1826. “The churches of all sects, not the government, who provided basic elementary schools in a wild colony, and just a handful of secondary schools, none of which survive.”

A failure of an organised approach: 1826 to 1880. Education was one of the major topics in the colony during a period when no scheme for schools prevailed. The Anglicans tried to set up a system, which failed within four years. “Australia’s first Bishop, William Grant Broughton, established the King’s School in the vacuum,” Hastie said.

“Governor Richard Bourke then proposed introducing the Irish national system of nondenominational schooling in 1836, which had been designed to mitigate the deep sectarian differences in both New South Wales and in Ireland that was leading to such a poor education for their children. This was vigorously and successfully opposed by William Grant Broughton. This then led to a period of struggle over whether state schools or denominational schools should constitute Australian education.”

The Bishops led the resistance to state education, but the laity and clergy thought differently.

“Consider these numbers,” Hastie asked. In 1865, we had 171 Anglican schools in New South Wales, which was the Sydney Diocese. In 1879, there were 67 Anglican schools in New South Wales, 34 in Sydney. Three years later, there were 31 Anglican schools in Sydney. Two years later, there were 16 Anglican schools in Sydney. Only King’s and St. Catherine’s survive from those schools. The rise of state schooling then became a form of civic Protestantism.

This was Hastie’s first great revelation. There are 23 Anglican schools dubbed “corporate schools” by Hastie in Sydney diocese: “the great corporate schools currently operating in the Sydney diocese, only two of which already mentioned were established prior to 1880. Those schools were modelled on the British Greater Public School System or GPS system, which confusingly is the opposite of what we mean by public schools today, although they’re still called GPS, and one is actually a public school.

“It’s confusing. Another interchangeable word I like to use is imperial schools. That is having been established and run on an ethos of preparing amongst others members of the Australian ruling classes to lead the country, to lead from the centre of the establishment, which in the day meant Anglican in the context of the British Empire.”

Then there are the 23 schools of the new wave that started after 1980 – of which more later.

That leaves “70 other Anglican schools that have now closed operated in the Sydney diocese in between 1880 and 1975.” Hastie points out that their history is largely unwritten.

More Anglican schools have closed in Sydney than currently operate.

According to Hastie’s figures, there have been a total of 115 Anglican schools in the Sydney diocese since 1880, 45 of which still operate today.

Displaying a list of the 70 closed schools, Hastie comments, “Take, for example, St. Paul’s Heber Chapel opened by Thomas Hassell in 1828, was still going in 1912. Local legend says 1920, but I haven’t found any evidence of it. The [Christ Church] St. Laurence schools operated for 106 years until they closed in 1936, their last site being the Dolls Point site that’s just been bought by Scots. The Darlinghurst school went on for 114 years. These stories are all forgotten now, but they’re a story of the Anglican schools in Sydney.”

For Hastie the existence of so many schools indicated that many local Anglican clergy and their congregations did not accept state education and attempted to run their own local schools – at a time when elementary education was the main object of schools – widespread secondary education was a feature of post WWII.

Public Schools after 1880: Describing the public schools as “civic Protestantism” was no hollow slogan. The Public Instruction Act of 1880 which established the public system, with similar moves in the other states around the same time, provided for an hour of religious instruction a day. Hastie revealed it was the churches that lobbied to cut it back to an hour a week because they could not cope. That hour – Special Religious Education (SRE) – was taken very seriously by the Sydney Anglican synod. “Sydney did not follow … the general pattern across Australia and is something of a caricature today, by the way, do nothing and concentrate on a few prestigious secondary schools.” Hastie quotes Bishop Barker telling synod in 1878: “That few questions can be of more importance than the religious instruction of our children in public schools.”

Together with Sunday Schools, and the few Corporate schools, SRE was part of a three-pronged approach to schooling by the Sydney diocese until the last decades of the twentieth century. But different Archbishops had different priorities. Bishop Barry who succeeds Barker is horrified, Hastie says, that the church has accepted public education, and turns his attention to establishing corporate schools, starting Shore and the Cathedral school, begins the SCEGGS system, and revitalises King’s and St Catherine’s.

When the fight over state aid for schools emerges in the 1950’s the Anglicans are opposed. Hastie described Archbishop Mowll as unequivical “The Church of England has accepted the public school system in New South Wales and loyally supported it. Such a nationwide education for the children makes for unity, for community of interest and for maintenance of national traditions”, Hastie adding “i.e. not Catholic.”

In 1960 Archbishop Gough makes a statement that proponents of independent schools today are unlikely to ever make. “A system of public education which is based in religious principles as exemplified in the education act of New South Wales, is capable of satisfying the basic requirements of Christian education in conducting some schools under its own control. The Church of England does not desire in any way to rival, supplant or impoverish the public education system. Only so long as church schools can be maintained by independent economic means is their existence justifiable.”

But the Anglican schools themselves took a different line – it was discovered that six schools had already accepted government grants for capital works and science labs from the Menzies government.

But the final reversal of position comes as the late twentieth century Archbishop, Harry Goodhew establishes the latest wave of Anglican schools.

Goodhew in 1994: “I would like to encourage the establishment of the low-fee mission minded Anglican schools in growth areas that offer some complimentary models to the state system linked through the local parishes with the strategy of church growth and local outreach. The council, [now the Anglican Schools Corporation] with my strong encouragement has been exploring setting up as many as 15 new schools in the next decade or so, a new step that could be as significant as the step in 1880.”

1880 was when the Anglicans had pushed public education. Goodhew was reversing the policy of restricting Anglican schools to an upper class.

Hastie pointed out that in 1965 there were 890,000 pupils in New South Wales. 24.8% of those were in non-government schools and only 1.5% were in Anglican schools.

23 low-fee schools later the Anglicans have contributed to NSW, 45.5% of year 12 students are now in non-government schools.

The Other Cheek looked into the numbers after the lecture: According to the Association of Independent Schools, in 2022, Anglican schools had 58,340 FTE students, which was 25 per cent of the non-Government schools, not counting the Catholic system. The NSW Government statistics shows a total of 790,848 school students in 2022. This indicates that Anglicans now have 7.4 per cent of NSW students attending their schools.

Hastie finished with a couple of searching questions “It appears now that the 1879 concerns of the Catholic church, which they published in an ad in the Sydney Morning Herald to the horror of almost everyone, that conceding to the Public Instruction Act would lead to the decline of religion in their flock may have come true with the rise of big secularism in public schools.”

“But having said that, it took a century and it may be that public education was a correlation rather than a cause. Certainly in the last 30 years, Catholic schooling has not led to strong church attendance amongst their school graduates, nor has it in Anglican schooling.”

Image: Old King’s School Parramatta – the school operated from this site from in O’Connell Street, Parramatta from 1834 three years after it was founded. The King’s School moved to North Parramatta in stages 1962-1968. After serving as a training centre for people with an intellectual disability, and in 2018 became a public school now called Bayanami Public School. Image credit: sv1ambo/wikimedia