Following a recent popular article in The Conversation that he co-authored, we asked Flinders Education expert Dr Andrew Bills why Australian parents are starting their own schools for their children.

What is your role here at Flinders?

I joined Flinders University 10 years ago, working as a continuing balanced academic and specialising in Educational Leadership and Inclusion. In recent years, I have developed and taught the CPE topics Pedagogical Leadership and Educational Policy, Politics and Practice on shore. Offshore, I have been teaching Strategic Planning and Knowledge Management for several years (part of the long-running Nankai and Flinders University partnership) in the Educational Leadership Master’s Course.

I’m Chief Investigator for three industry-funded research projects (concluding in 2025) that examine and support the development of new and emerging schools in South Australia, working with the research traditions of critical sociology, critical participatory action research and hermeneutic phenomenology. Next year a fourth project called Doing Schooling Differently in the North is planned, which is a three-year equity-based project involving participatory action research with public school leaders and teachers in twelve disadvantaged school communities in the northern metropolitan region of Adelaide.

Getting paid to teach and research in my areas of interest with academic friends and students is a gift. Conditional on funding grant success, the work offers me the professional freedom to creatively work with industry and university colleagues and address manifestations of system and school policy and practice inequalities. I also get to enact research-informed strategies to make some progress in addressing dimensions of these challenges. This involves forming respectful professional relationships with politicians, academics, system leaders and teachers across the three education sectors. It also generates translational research for media outlets and initiating cross-education sector ‘spotlight’ seminars with the SA Commissioner for Children and Young People to examine and debate with invited high-level stakeholders on topical social issues that negatively impact young people inside and outside of the schooling fence. Boredom has no place in this job.

Tell us your favourite unknown fact about your field.

Since 2012, the Gonski education reforms have made it even more economically feasible for parents, and communities to establish new independent schools. The federal government funds 80% of each non-government school’s schooling resource standard – and this has seen small schools that cater to a specific parent or community need become more common. The largest growth area of these is Special Assistance Schools, which are primarily for students who have dropped out of mainstream school. There are also new schools for students with high academic potential, bush schools, sports schools, performing arts and music schools, science-based schools and sustainable schools.

For more information about this, see The Conversation article I wrote with Research Associate Nigel Howard titled Parents have just started their own school in Sydney – this is part of a long tradition in Australia.

How did you get into your field?

Before coming to Flinders, I worked for three years as a Research Fellow on a UniSA ARC-funded middle schooling project. My move to the university sector followed a 20-year career in the public education system, where I worked as a special education teacher and counsellor, and then in the alternative education space to initiate, develop and lead two new senior secondary schools. I also worked in the bureaucracy as an Education Leadership Consultant and Manager of a state-wide federally funded literacy improvement project.

What’s your favourite thing to do in your spare time?

Being with friends and family over good food and wine is my number one social highlight, closely followed by social golf, tennis and badminton.