She said job losses were likely due to falling revenue, high staffing costs and uncertainty over whether staff would qualify for the government's wage replacement scheme. Catholic Education Melbourne acting executive director Jim Miles said it was "essential that we minimise disruptions to students to ensure that they can continue accessing a high-quality Catholic education." With Victoria’s one million students largely learning from home this term, private schools have also been inundated with requests for fee cuts to compensate for students not having access to school grounds and extra-curricular activities. High-fee independent schools such as Melbourne Grammar and Mentone Girls' Grammar have offered term two fee cuts and Catholic schools have urged parents to negotiate individual reductions and stressed that costs were mostly fixed for the year and in some cases had risen to deal with the crisis.

Ms Blackwood said job cuts were "certainly politically sensitive but the reality for independent schools is 70 per cent or more of their budget are staff salaries, so if they’re going to make fiscal cuts the only place they can meaningfully do that is through staff." “And if they've got a declining number of enrolments then how can they sustain the level of staffing that they may have started with at the beginning of the year?" Catholic and independent schools employ about 157,000 full-time equivalent staff between them across Australia. In Victoria, where 36 per cent of students attend non-government schools, the sectors employ about 43,500 full-time equivalent staff. Ms Blackwood said there had been few job cuts so far, despite boarding schools "sitting there empty" across the country. Haileybury College and Ballarat Clarendon College recently walked away from plans to sack staff after the Independent Education Union took the two schools to the Fair Work Commission.

Meg Hansen, principal of Westbourne Grammar in Truganina, said "most schools and most people I know want to keep all of their staff because they know they are going to need them [when campuses reopen to all students]. But they may not be able to afford to keep them." "If there were some other instrument that could be developed by governments to support schools through this difficult time, that would be good," she said. Meg Hansen, principal of Westbourne Grammar School Credit:Charlotte Grieve Mr Tehan did not respond to questions on whether the government would provide further funding to non-government schools, or proceed with independent schools' request to bring forward recurrent payments due in June. Grattan Institute school education program director Peter Goss said "supporting schools so they can keep paying their staff has real value, just as it does for other small businesses". But he said in the medium term, schools should not be shielded from making tough decisions.