If you are unhappy with an aspect of your child's public schooling, you can raise it with the teacher, or complain to the principal. If still not satisfied, you can go to your state education department. When Queensland father Ron Williams had exhausted all those avenues for his concerns about the National School Chaplaincy and Student Welfare Program, he took the ultimate step: he challenged the program's constitutional validity in the High Court of Australia.

His campaign was largely crowd-funded by often similarly disgruntled parents and kick-started with a seeding grant from the Humanist Society of Queensland, with logistical support from extremely articulate members of the Australian Secular Lobby. All this gave Williams a certain folk hero status.

Folk hero status: Ron Williams, who succeeded in his case in the High Court challenging the national school chaplaincy program. Credit:Andrew Meares

In 2012, the court agreed with Williams that the program was unconstitutional. The Federal Parliament passed "quick fix" legislation that it hoped would legitimise not just the chaplaincy program but the 400-odd other Commonwealth-funded activities, accounting for up to 10 per cent of federal government spending, that were similarly invalidated by the decision.

So back to the High Court. On Thursday, the judges ruled, 6-0, that the Commonwealth's legal Band-Aid had not worked: the spending on the chaplaincy program was as illegal as ever.