The Age is running a set of articles today on private schools that poach students from neighbouring schools.
The articles mainly focus on Haileybury College's attempts to grow the student population at its newly started girls school. (The school will be based on 'parallel education' --- roughly, this means mixed-sex campuses but single-sex classrooms.) This has involved offering full and partial scholarships (worth up to $18,000 according to The Age), that has encouraged students from other schools to move to the college.
I have 2 concerns about this (maybe more, if I gave it more thought). My first concern stems from the fact that these 'private' schools are actually funded substantially by the government. As many would know, federal funding to private schools has grown to more than twice the funding of public schools, as the following graph shows (from the AEU, and compiled from the States Grants Reports and Budget Papers):
(Click picture to open the AEU fact sheet.)
My worry is that these funds are simply subsidising the efforts of these schools to poach the best students from other schools. It isn't relevant whether the funding is used directly to poach students, since (as per economic theory) subsidising one thing simply frees up funding for another.
My second concern is that parents will be fed the wrong information about the quality of a school. If one school can take the best students from other schools in their final year, this will inflate the Year 12 results of that school, while deflating the Year 12 results of the source schools. While students might actually have a better chance of good results at the source schools, parents will (wrongly) believe they should send their children to the schools that poach.
Articles: