150 Years of Free, Secular and Compulsory Education

The Education Act was passed 150 years ago, in Victoria on 17 December 1872. This legislation made the colony of Victoria one of the first jurisdictions in the world to offer free, compulsory and secular education to its children. Public education was now administered by the centralised Victorian Department of Education.

Subsequent to the Act, education was free, children were obliged to attend school from the age of 6 to 15, and secular instruction promoted fairness and harmony in a society then riven by sectarianism. Before 1872 most schools were controlled by Catholic or Protestant churches or were privately operated, and many children were not receiving an education at all. To accommodate the increase in the number of students, a major school building program took place throughout the colony during the 1870s and 1880s, overseen by architect Henry Robert Bastow (1839–1920). Many of these beautiful neo-Gothic buildings are still operating as schools today.

Free, secular and compulsory education may have started in Victoria, but the principles underlying the Education Act of 1872 soon spread to the other colonies. By 1908, all six states of the Commonwealth of Australia had centralised government departments administering free, compulsory and secular education. Today, Australia has a robust public education system, with the majority of children attending public government schools.