This Issues Brief explains that decisions about the opening and closing of schools and the school calendar are, for non-government schools, largely left in local hands. This arrangement is the result of over a century of productive dialogue between the government and the non-government school sector. 

For New South Wales (NSW), the determination of instructional time is an undefined parameter of schooling. This is not the result of a regulatory omission. Rather, it is a product of regulations drawn up by co-design which sought to grant nongovernment schools flexibility, while upholding educational standards. In doing so, the then NSW Government in 1989 stated: “The Government favours a more balanced and less prescriptive approach… Standards will be maintained but diversity and innovation will not be discouraged.” 

This approach presents a contrast with more recent trends, which have seen the Commonwealth government progressively return to a model of more direct government intervention in respect of the regulation of all schools. This paper demonstrates that in the design of regulation, cooperation between the regulator and those regulated can be productively applied to the governance of schooling. Importantly for Catholic schools, the self-regulation of ‘school hours’ has been, from the perspective of Catholic schools, an intentional public policy result driven by three interrelated imperatives.

1. The necessity to preserve and promote the Catholic identity of Catholic schools.
2. The need to maintain the management prerogatives of the proprietors of Catholic schools.
3. The historic struggle to win and maintain public funding for Catholic schools following the NSW Public Instruction Act 1880.