Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size The free-standing concrete grandstand overlooking the Dunshea Oval at Carey Baptist Grammar's sprawling sports complex is completely full on this cold, misty Melbourne winter's day. To the rugged-up throng watching this game of Australian football between affluent private schools, the very Melbourne question – "which school did you go to?" – remains potent. The vast majority of the spectators who ring the oval are students, parents and alumni of Carey and their opponents, Caulfield Grammar School. They're here, on an expanse of Bulleen parkland near the Eastern Freeway, for the August 3 game that will decide the premiership of the prestigious Associated Public Schools competition. Across the oval, there's no seating, only a clunky rectangular electronic scoreboard and a backdrop of trees. Just metres from the boundary, a tall, bald, middle-aged man with a Roman centurion's bearing is seated on a fold-up camping chair, taking notes. Hamish Ogilvie, recruiting manager of the Adelaide Crows, and his offsider, Binuk Kodituwakku, are here to assess some of these teenagers for their AFL-worthiness. The two most keenly watched kids are Carey's co-captains and best mates, Matt Rowell and Noah Anderson. On Wednesday night, the names of Rowell and Anderson will be the first called out, as picks one and two, in the AFL's national draft by the Gold Coast Suns, whose successful pitch to the AFL for an extra early draft pick was predicated on the opportunity to recruit both the Carey captains.


Noah Anderson (right) is set to join his best mate and Carey teammate Matt Rowell at Gold Coast. Credit:Justin McManus I ask Ogilvie "who's here" from the clubs? "Everyone," he replies. Fingering through the team lists on the program, Ogilvie rattles off the names of the nine or 10 AFL prospects, as if they were his first cousins. Certainly most of the 18 AFL clubs' scouts are at Carey, not so much to watch Rowell and Anderson, who will be selected before 17 teams have a choice, but to assess several others. No school – state, private or Catholic – has ever produced the first two players in the draft. When this happens, Carey will feel a burst of pride and see a surge of publicity. But this novelty of two schoolmates going one and two in the AFL draft is really a signpost of a far more momentous shift within Australian Rules football. For a host of reasons, which start but don't end with scholarships, private schools are producing footballers for the AFL at an burgeoning rate. On Wednesday, the majority of the first 30 names called out will likely be from what can be characterised as elite private schools, either from Victoria's APS, its Associated Grammar Schools (AGS) or equivalent schools in Adelaide and Perth. It's a gradual trend, like the slowly boiled frog. Most pertinently, it is a shift that was not driven by the AFL; rather, it's a change that reflects competition and resources within our education system.


"Geelong Grammar's got a bigger salary cap than Collingwood," quipped one AFL official, explaining how so much talent had been herded into the boarding houses and immaculate fields. Whereas the rugby codes, from the outset, were divided along class lines – traditional rugby union was the domain of the upper crust from private schools in NSW and Queensland, while upstart rugby league was the blue-collar game – Australian Rules owed its strength to the fact that it was played and watched by all-comers, by the sons of investment bankers and tradies, by lawyers and labourers, suits and singlets. Footy remains the glue that binds disparate stratas in the southern states. Yet the drift towards private-schooled footballers in this egalitarian code is undeniable. According to the APS' figures, just over a quarter – 25.6 per cent – of the players drafted to AFL clubs in 2017 came from the 11 schools who make up the APS, which also supplied four of the first five picked. That's just 11 schools from one state, out of 2755 Australian schools that run to year 12 (2018). The 11 schools are cradles of the country's owners and decision-makers: Melbourne Grammar, Scotch College, Geelong Grammar, Xavier College, Wesley College, St Kevin's College, Haileybury College, Caulfield Grammar, Brighton Grammar, Geelong College and Carey Grammar. In 2018, the percentage drafted from these elite 11 schools was 24.3 per cent and, on the basis of the AFL website's phantom draft, the APS, AGS and schools with that stature in Adelaide and Perth are forecast to account for at least 17 of the first 30 next week. The definition of "elite" precludes the likes of established and well-regarded Catholic colleges such as St Joseph's Geelong, St Patrick's in Ballarat and Whitefriars (Donvale), whose alumni account for 31 current AFL players.


"The trend has sort of come through the last five to six years and it's increasing every year," said Luke Soulos, the executive officer for APS sport since 2003, of the private schools' share. St Kevin's and Xavier each had 14 players on AFL lists in 2019. Credit:Justin McManus POSH BOYS Professor John Funder has written more than 600 medical research papers, and chaired a series of international and national organisations, including VicHealth and Sane Australia. Last year, in London with his wife Val, he couldn't resist a book in Hatchard's bookstore called Posh Boys by Robert Verkaik. The subtitle more than hints at the author's thesis: "How English Public Schools Ruin Britain". In Posh Boys, the author provides some astonishing breakdowns for the proportion of public school graduates in prestige fields. As in Australia, "public schools" is a misnomer, since the "public school" is utterly private – and male. The English public schools – exemplified by Eton, Harrow and Rugby – cover just 7 per cent of English male schoolboys, yet account for an extraordinary 74 per cent of senior judges in the United Kingdom, 71 per cent of senior officers in the armed forces, 50 per cent of cabinet ministers and, startlingly, 50 per cent of male Olympic athletes. Funder, a Collingwood supporter, decided to examine the whole AFL for schools of origin. His starting assumption was that, as a code that reflected the diverse breadth of Australian society, schools would be represented along the lines of overall secondary school enrolments for year 12. He based it on Victorian figures: 55 per cent from government schools, 24 per cent from Catholic schools and the remaining 21 per cent from independent schools. But this was not what Funder found in his study.


Funder, 79, obtained a meeting with AFL boss Gillon McLachlan and two other senior executives, requesting the information on schools of origin for all male players on AFL lists. Eventually, Funder got the AFL's school breakdown. Of 787 AFL footballers in 2019 – 99.7 per cent of the total – the carve-up was: government schools 29.86 per cent, Catholic schools 31.38 per cent, independent 38.76 per cent. Thus, he concluded, your chances of playing AFL are almost four times higher if you went to an independent school than a state school and almost three times higher if you went to a Catholic school.The independent number would be even higher if he had counted the Xavier and St Kevin equivalents in Perth and Adelaide as "independent" rather than Catholic. Funder was surprised, but he shouldn't have been. What's behind the disproportionate number of private-schooled footballers, and what does it mean? IN the early and mid-1980s, there weren't many successful league footballers from the likes of Melbourne Grammar, Scotch and their APS brethren. In this era, strong Catholic schools like Assumption College and Marcellin College (both AGS) were more renowned for production of players than the schools that absolutely reeked of privilege. In footy circles, there was a view that private schoolboys were softer than hardscrabble kids, that they "lacked the wound" as Norman Mailer once said of his aristocratic literary rival Gore Vidal; were less invested in making the grade, in part because they were destined for more lucrative careers. Capable private school footballers were expected to progress no further than the old boy teams in the amateurs.

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