File photo. There are 427 students enrolled in the country's eight charter schools. Photo: Unsplash
The Charter School Agency has revealed there are 427 students enrolled in the eight charter schools.
The number of enrolments has been kept under wraps after the agency told the privately-run, state-funded schools not to reveal their numbers while they were still setting up.
But at the agency's annual review before Parliament's Education and Workforce Select Committee, outgoing chief executive, Jane Lee, said in September there were 427 students across eight schools.
"We have schools that have a range of in-between 30 right through to over 100 students and what we see, because we do collect attendance and enrolment data, what we can see is a trajectory of increased rolls," she said.
Lee said most of the schools would reach the number of students agreed in their contracts.
"At the end of this year most of those schools, if not all, will be at their establishment rolls."
Lee appeared before the committee on her final day of work as the agency's establishment CEO.
She said information about students' achievement and attendance would be published in May next year.
"We have collected interim data and what we can see from that interim data is that most students have made sufficient rates of progress and in some cases accelerated rates of progress," Lee said.
Earlier, Lee indicated there was nothing to stop a repeat of the situation faced recently by Kelston Boys High.
The school was the target of an attempted conversion to charter status by an outside group, the Bangerz Education and Wellbeing Trust.
Lee said applications for conversion had to demonstrate to the Charter School Authorisation Board that they had community support.
"During that application process, Kelston could demonstrate that they had support from parts of their community, which the authorisation board took into account," she said.
"The next part of that process... was to undertake their own consultation process and that is one of the stop measures to ensure there is full community backing. If there isn't full community backing it is very unlikely that the authorisation board would approve the applicant to come to contracting."
Lee faced questions about the agency's error in signing a contract for a charter school with a trust that did not exist.
"When the authorisation board approved the sponsor for contracting there was an error through the contracting process where the trust changed its name so it was an administrative error," she said.
"Therefore we contracted with an entity that did not exist because they had changed their name part-way through."
Lee said the agency had since introduced "further robust processes" to ensure the contracting sponsor was the sponsor all the way through the contract process.
Agency staff told the committee the schools' sponsors received $10.9 million in 2024/25 including $6.3m in one-off establishment funding, and $4.6m in operational funding.
It said much of the operational funding was based on the schools' "establishment roll", which was the number of students they expected to have after five school terms of operation.
The agency said charter schools were given just a year to set themselves up, whereas some state schools were funded for establishment for three years.
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