Ethical Education (https://www.ethicaleducation.com.au/) was founded by High Old Boys Tushaar Garg, Allen Chen, John Seroukas (’14) and James Ruse Old Boy Mudith Jayasekara, in 2020. The organisation is a registered charity providing an accessible tutoring service that restores parity in the schooling landscape. This is achieved through volunteer tutors being allocated to means-tested Year 10-12 students for low-cost one-on-one weekly tuition. Ethical Education aims to improve education in the community by supporting the development of students who are marginalised and have limited engagement with education, through a local community-driven solution.

Tushaar, Allen and John were all good friends at High and spent a lot of time together on the sports fields. Tushaar was 1st XI cricket captain and spent Saturdays playing alongside Allen, who was an avid leg-spinner. John was a goalkeeper in the 1st XI football team and part of the CHS East winning side in 2014. Tushaar also won the Lawrence Campbell Oratory Competition in 2014, working a lot with John who was a very successful senior debater. Rest assured, they relished the opportunities that High and the broader GPS network provided them. Most of all, they recount their time at High as plenty of fun, plenty of trouble and integral in shaping them to be who they are today. They seemed to learn a lot in the classroom too, which sent them all down the road to UNSW. This is where they first realised that the platform they were given to grow and learn, wasn’t always available to all of their peers across the state.

In response to the disparity in education and the increasingly competitive entry into tertiary education, students, with the aid of their parents, will often go to great lengths to gain an educational advantage over their peers. For many, this means private tuition, either at a tutoring centre or through a private tutor, one-on-one. As a result, private tutoring is now expected to grow to a $1bn industry with an estimated 4,000 tutoring businesses in Australia. The rising uptake of tutoring and increased cost has created significant inequity as the cost of tutoring excludes most disadvantaged students. Australia has been reported to spend a disproportionate amount on tutoring as compared to other OECD countries with ~30% of students participating in tutoring.

Whilst Ethical Education does not necessarily support the growth of the private tutoring sector, they acknowledge that there can be a need for supplementary education; more often for disadvantaged youth. The organisation does not aim to be a solution to the transition of the education landscape, but a way to level the playing field for those from marginalised backgrounds with limited engagement with education. During the coronavirus pandemic, it became apparent that this problem would only be exacerbated with comprehensive high schools struggling to accommodate for remote learning in comparison to selective and private high schools. So in 2020, Ethical Education was launched.

In 2022, Ethical Education has now graduated over 50 students and continues to grow. The organisation was also recently awarded the Edified Energiser Grant, in recognition of their great work in the community (read more here).