Church Schools and the Culture They Form (Part Two)

By Jason Masters FAICD PFIIA, LinkedIn

This is part two of two. Part one, The Algorithm Has a Discipleship Strategy, argued that recommender systems form boys by repetition and that churches answer with the practised, non-dominating masculinity Jesus describes in Mark 10. Part two asks a harder question of churches that own, sponsor or name schools. What culture are those schools forming, and who is accountable for it?

The August 2026 charges against students from The Scots College and St Gregory’s College are part of a longer file. That file runs through a tram in Melbourne, a scavenger-hunt list in Sydney, a Discord group, a ranking spreadsheet, and AI-generated images in Hobart and Canberra. Each episode was treated as an exception. Read together, they describe a practice.

What the research shows and does not show

The concentration of recent allegations around private religious schools raises a legitimate question. The Australian evidence does not support the simple conclusion that private schooling causes sexual violence. The school sector is entangled with gender segregation, religious ethos, family selection, socioeconomic privilege, geography and institutional culture. Few studies separate those influences.

A 2026 qualitative study comes unusually close to the present concern. Researchers surveyed 650 students, 287 parents and 46 staff at one affluent, independent, faith-based boys’ school in metropolitan Australia. Boys described prosocial expectations as more salient at home and dominance-oriented norms as enforced in school peer settings. Their accounts drew on manosphere narratives and resistance to progressive change, even as many boys recognised the personal and social costs. The study demonstrates a mechanism within one school. It does not establish prevalence across the sector (Harrington et al., 2026).

A 2025 study interviewed 500 students aged 13 to 17 at eight elite single-sex private schools in Queensland. Both boys and girls continued to express traditional beliefs about gender roles, with limited evidence their schooling was disrupting occupational stereotypes. The sample is substantial. It has no government school or coeducational comparison group and did not measure sexual offending (Yates et al., 2025).

Evidence about LGBTIQA+ students allows stronger comparisons. A convenience survey of 1,293 LGBTIQA+ students found those attending religious schools reported more institutional restrictions, more anti-LGBTIQA+ messages and more adverse consequences for being open about their identity than students at government schools (Jones, 2023). A separate survey of 1,926 LGBTQ+ students found non-religious private schools were perceived as safer than either government or religious private schools. Personal experiences of inclusion problems and sexual harassment did not differ significantly by school type (Mann et al., 2025).

The defensible conclusion is narrower than the headlines. Some elite, single-sex and religious school environments contain conditions capable of reinforcing dominance, gender essentialism and hostility to difference. Whether they do so depends on peer norms, teaching, leadership, safeguarding and accountability. That is a reason for scrutiny, not a verdict on every student or school.

The incident file is not a dataset

Research studies are not the only evidence. Public incidents do not tell us how common a behaviour is across the sector, and media attention is not evenly distributed. They do reveal what groups of boys regard as funny, permissible or worth rewarding, and how institutions responded when those attitudes became visible.

In 2019, students from St Kevin’s College, a Catholic boys’ school in Melbourne, sang a misogynistic chant in uniform on a crowded tram while travelling to an inter-school athletics event. Other footage showed Year 12 students repeating the chant in public after the first recording became public. The headmaster acknowledged the cultural problem was more widespread than the school had understood. A later cultural review found sexism and misogyny still occurred at the school (ABC News, 2019, 2021b).

This example matters because the performance was collective, public and visibly attached to the school’s identity. It was not one boy privately consuming harmful content. It was a group using contempt for women as a bonding ritual.

In 2020, a small group of Year 12 students at Sydney Church of England Grammar School, commonly known as Shore, prepared a proposed end-of-school scavenger hunt containing more than 150 challenges. They included spitting on a homeless person, assaulting strangers, excessive drinking and sexualised tasks involving women. The school discovered the plan, prohibited participation, alerted police and threatened participants with expulsion. There is no basis for saying the published list was carried out (ABC News, 2020). What matters is that homeless people, women and strangers were imagined as props in a game through which boys awarded one another status.

In 2021, Chanel Contos began Teach Us Consent by asking whether respondents or people close to them had been sexually assaulted by someone who attended a Sydney single-sex school. Within six months, the project had received more than 6,000 testimonies. Those self-selected accounts are not a representative sample for a prevalence survey. They do not establish the comparative rate of offending by school sector. Their scale exposed experiences official systems had not heard and helped force consent education onto the national agenda (ABC News, 2021a).

Read the testimonies before you read the statistics. The girls describe parties, bedrooms and after-school afternoons in the suburbs where these schools sit. They describe not being believed, being told to keep quiet, and watching the boy return to school unchanged. Whatever the sector comparison shows, those experiences are the reason this article exists.

National survey evidence gives that testimony a wider frame. In the Australian Child Maltreatment Study, respondents aged 16 to 24 reported sexual harm inflicted by children or young people more often than abuse inflicted by adults, 18.2 per cent compared with 11.7 per cent (Mathews et al., 2024). That does not mean every harmful act was committed by a teenage boy, and it does not establish that algorithms caused the generational shift. The National Office for Child Safety (n.d.) cautions against placing children who display harmful sexual behaviours into the adult category of offender. The distinction protects the possibility of development and intervention without diminishing the harm experienced by victims and survivors.

In 2022, students at Knox Grammar participated in a private Discord group containing offensive commentary, inappropriate images and doctored material. The school expelled some students, suspended others and referred the content to police. Police later said the material supplied to them did not constitute child abuse material (Australian Associated Press, 2022). Accuracy matters here. This was not established to be a child abuse or deepfake site. It was still a peer-controlled online space where degrading material circulated and attracted attention.

The form has continued to mutate. In 2024, boys at Melbourne’s Yarra Valley Grammar ranked female classmates in categories including ‘unrapeable’. Two students were expelled (ABC News, 2024a). Weeks later, fake sexualised images of about 50 girls at Bacchus Marsh Grammar circulated online. Police arrested a teenage boy and later released him while inquiries continued (ABC News, 2024b). In 2026, Canberra Grammar investigated a list ranking the appearance of 100 female students (ABC News, 2026a). The Friends’ School in Hobart dealt with alleged AI-generated sexual images affecting 21 girls (ABC News, 2026b).

These examples extend beyond boys-only schools and beyond Sydney. They do not prove private or religious schooling causes misogyny. Sexism is well documented in government schools. They do show a recurring social practice. Girls and women are reduced to rankings, challenges, images, and stories for circulation among boys. The technology changes, from a printed list to Discord to generative AI. The underlying act is recognisable. Another person becomes material for male belonging.

Schools are also workplaces

The 2023 murder of 21-year-old water polo coach Lilie James at St Andrew’s Cathedral School belongs in this discussion with an important boundary. The NSW Coroner found her former partner and colleague killed her in the context of domestic and gendered violence (State Coroner’s Court of New South Wales, 2025). It would be wrong to present her death as evidence that the school’s students or religious ethos caused the crime. It does remind us that schools are workplaces, and that safeguarding must include technology-facilitated coercion, stalking and violence between adults rather than stopping at what students learn in a consent lesson.

St Andrew’s present practice deserves to be part of the record. The school says it launched its Character Education program in 2021 and has since embedded it through K to 12 classes, tutor groups, pastoral care, service and leadership (St Andrew’s Cathedral School, n.d.). A school article described an age-sequenced wellbeing curriculum in which younger children learn about healthy friendships and Senior College students address consent and romantic relationships, with positive psychology shaped by the school’s Christian foundations (St Andrew’s Cathedral School, 2024).

In June 2026, the school hosted a parent workshop with Tomorrow Man and Tomorrow Woman, titled ‘Disrupting the Manosphere’, addressing healthy masculinities, empathy, connection, behaviour change, and respectful relationships (St Andrew’s Cathedral School, 2026). These are promising features. Formation is explicit and repeated, involves families and treats online culture as part of relationship education.

That positive account should not be overstated. The program predates James’s murder and should not be presented as a response to her death. The available descriptions come from the school, not an independent evaluator. They establish program design, continuity and institutional willingness to act. They do not establish that student attitudes or behaviour have changed.

The same evidentiary discipline applies to the August 2026 charges involving students from The Scots College and St Gregory’s College. The alleged assaults are before the courts. They are not convictions, nor proof of a sector-wide causal relationship (ABC News, 2026c; Australian Associated Press, 2026). Placed beside the research and the longer incident file, they make it reasonable to ask whether gender segregation, privilege, peer status, religious teaching and institutional reputation are being examined together, or whether every episode is still being treated as an inexplicable exception.

The biblical text: anger without accountability

Part one ended with David’s confession after Nathan’s rebuke. The next chapter shows what happens when a house protects itself instead.

In 2 Samuel 13, Amnon rapes Tamar. David becomes angry. The text records no justice for her. She is left desolate while the royal family closes ranks and male vengeance grows until it destroys the household (NRSVue, 2021, 2 Samuel 13:1 to 22). That is the biblical text in context. A king and father is angry and does nothing, and the institution absorbs the harm.

My interpretation is that anger without accountability is not repentance. It preserves the house rather than restoring the person harmed within it. Every school leader who has issued a statement of deep concern and then returned to the question of reputation should read this chapter slowly.

Malachi 2 brings the point into worship. Men cover the altar with tears and wonder why their offerings are not accepted. The prophet answers that they have been faithless to their wives (NRSVue, 2021, Malachi 2:13 to 16). Scholars dispute whether the passage concerns divorce, foreign marriage or idolatry described as marital betrayal, and the Hebrew of verse 16 is difficult. On any reading, religious intensity does not compensate for relational betrayal. For churches, the treatment of women is not a social issue adjacent to discipleship. It is evidence of whether the worshipping community has understood faithfulness at all.

The church’s own record

A church demanding accountability from its schools must first subject itself to the same test. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that Australian churches, including my own, protected institutions ahead of children for decades. That record does not disqualify the church from speaking. It sets the standard for how it speaks. Demonstrate, do not assert.

The other repetition system

Part one argued that the social media feed wins by repetition. A school is the only other institution with comparable reach. It has a boy for around 200 days a year for thirteen years. No church program comes close. If a church school does not use that time to repeat a better account of bodies, consent, sex and relationships, the feed will use it instead.

The repetition must be sequenced to the child’s age, because the feed is. In the early years, the feed offers cartoons, unboxing videos, and games, and it starts to learn what holds attention. School at that age names body parts correctly, teaches the difference between public and private, and establishes that a child decides who touches them and which adults are safe to tell.

In middle primary, the feed introduces gaming streamers and fitness content, and it starts sorting children by gender. School repeats respect in friendships, feelings and their names, and what to do when something online feels wrong.

In upper primary, the feed begins delivering puberty content, body ideals and the first pornography, often before a parent expects it. School teaches puberty, bodies, boundaries and what pornography is and is not.

By Years 7 to 9, the feed has found the boy. Fitness has become discipline, discipline has become hierarchy, and hierarchy has found its enemies. School repeats consent, the law on images and sexting, gender norms and where they come from, and what the manosphere is selling and why.

In Years 10 to 12 the feed offers relationships as transactions and women as prizes. School repeats consent under alcohol, coercive control, bystander responsibility, the workplace the student is about to enter, and what a relationship looks like when both people are safe in it.

None of this is novel. The Australian Curriculum has sequenced health and physical education from Foundation to Year 10, and education ministers agreed in 2022 that consent education be mandated across that range from 2023 (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2022). Our Watch has published a whole-school model for respectful relationships education that treats culture, staff, families and curriculum as one system rather than a lesson (Our Watch, 2021). The design exists. The question for a church school is whether it follows the sequence or substitutes something thinner.

The substitution is where church schools fail. A program that teaches abstinence in Year 9 and stops has handed Years 10 to 12 to the feed. A program that will not name pornography, queer students or the manosphere leaves the boy to learn those words from the people who profit from them. A program that teaches girls modesty and boys nothing has taught both the feed’s lesson in a Christian accent. Christian schools are entitled to teach a Christian account of sex and relationships. They are not entitled to teach less than the curriculum and call the gap values.

St Andrew’s Cathedral School describes an age-sequenced program running from Kindergarten to Year 12 (St Andrew’s Cathedral School, n.d., 2024). The description is the right shape. The question for every school is whether its repetition moves a boy past hearing a concept to knowing it, acting on it and holding to it under pressure, and whether it equips him to answer the feed’s repetition with his own. That is the governance question.

What your church owes its schools

Where a diocese, denomination, religious order or congregation owns a school, appoints its board or authorises its Christian identity, it owns the culture formed there. It cannot outsource that culture to education professionals and then invoke institutional distance when harm becomes public.

This is governance, not curriculum micromanagement. If you sit on a church council, synod, diocesan board or school board, these are the questions to ask.

First, is formation sequenced or occasional? Require the board to show what is taught about bodies, consent, sex, relationships, pornography, gendered violence and LGBTIQA+ safety at every year level from Kindergarten to Year 12, how each year builds on the last, and where the program departs from the Australian Curriculum sequence and why. One visiting speaker in Year 10 is not a program. The independent evaluation of The Man Cave found one-off sessions begin a conversation and rarely change behaviour without repetition, practical tools and trained adults (Elliott et al., 2022).

Second, does the school measure anything? Ask for the numbers a board should already hold. Complaints received and time to resolution. Student survey results on safety and respect, reported by gender and by year level. Incidents referred to police or regulators. Completion of staff safeguarding training. Trends over three years, not one.

Third, are serious incidents reviewed independently? A cultural review commissioned by the school and reported to the school is a start. Require that reviews of serious incidents are conducted by people the school does not employ, and that findings reach the church body that owns the school, not only the board that commissioned them.

Fourth, can a student report safely? Ask how a girl at the school or a boy who is being targeted can raise a concern without going through the person who runs the sport or the house. Ask who outside the school they can go to. Ask whether students have been asked that question themselves.

Fifth, is the church body reading what it receives? Boards report upward. The question is whether the diocese, synod or order reads the report, asks questions and records what it did with the answers. If the owning body cannot show its own minutes on school culture, it has not governed.

Sixth, publish. A school that claims Christian formation as its distinction should publish what it measures and what changed. Silence protects the house.

A church that owns the outcome

Christian formation cannot be claimed as the school’s distinction while responsibility for its outcomes is treated as someone else’s work. The boardroom, the classroom, the chapel, the complaints process and the measures leaders use to decide whether a school is becoming safer are one system. A church that names a school as part of its mission owns that system.

Part one argued that a boy needs a community where another way of being a man is practised often enough to be believed. For thousands of Australian boys, that community carries a church’s name on the gate. Whether it practises what the name promises is a governance question, and it is yours.

Scripture quotation marked NRSVue is from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, copyright 2021 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All other biblical language is paraphrase, with references supplied for checking.

Sources and claim notes

References

ABC News. (2019, October 25). St Kevin’s College principal condemns ‘foolish’ students after sexist chant repeated in public. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-25/st-kevins-sexist-chant-repeated-in-public/11638614

ABC News. (2020, September 23). Sydney’s Shore School threatens to expel students over ‘appalling’ muck-up day scavenger hunt. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-23/sydney-shore-school-threatens-expulsion-for-muck-up-challenges/12691756

ABC News. (2021a, September 17). Push to make sexual consent education compulsory in Australian curriculum to stem assaults. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-17/consent-education-australian-curriculum-teach-us-consent/100449910

ABC News. (2021b, July 16). St Kevin’s cultural review finds sexism and misogyny still occurs at the school. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-16/st-kevins-college-release-cultural-review-sexism/100296922

ABC News. (2024a, May 6). Students at Yarra Valley Grammar suspended over offensive ranking of female students. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-06/sexist-offensive-student-list-melbourne-yarra-valley-grammar/103808062

ABC News. (2024b, June 13). Victorian teachers also victims of fake explicit images created by students using AI. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-13/ai-generated-deepfake-pornography-school-students-teachers/103969414

ABC News. (2026a, August 3). Canberra Grammar School investigating after male students shared content ranking female students. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-03/canberra-private-school-boys-ranked-female-students/106982550

ABC News. (2026b, April 30). The Friends’ School denies discouraging parents from telling victims about deepfake incident. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-30/tas-friends-school-deny-dont-tell-to-parents-over-deepfakes/106624754

ABC News. (2026c, August 25). The Scots College students charged over alleged sexual assault have faced ‘repercussions’, judge says. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/private-school-students-sexual-assault-case-adjourned/107074910

Australian Associated Press. (2022, September 2). Knox Grammar student group chat contained no child abuse material, police say. The Guardian. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/sep/02/knox-grammar-school-group-chat-student-messages-no-child-abuse-material-found-police-say

Australian Associated Press. (2026, August 20). Two 17-year-olds from Sydney private school among three charged over alleged rape of teenage girl. The Guardian. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/20/three-boys-charged-alleged-rape-teenage-girl-sydney-ntwnfb

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2022). Australian Curriculum version 9.0: Health and Physical Education (F to 10). Retrieved 3 September 2026, from https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au/

Elliott, K., Roberts, S., Ralph, B., Stewart, R., Walker, J., & O’Brien, K. (2022). Evaluating programs aimed at gender transformative work with men and boys: A multi-cohort, cross-sector investigation. Monash University and VicHealth. https://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/20221012_Monash_GenderTransformativeWork.pdf

Harrington, A. G., Moss-Holland, S., Kuek, J., Neilson, A., Gouda-Vossos, A., & Blake, K. R. (2026). Out with the new, in with the old: How traditional masculine norms are constructed, communicated, and contested within an all-boys’ school community. Australian Journal of Psychology, 78(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/00049530.2026.2679704

Jones, T. (2023). Religious freedom and LGBTIQA+ students. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 20, 1133 to 1151. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-022-00785-w

Mann, T., Van Bergen, P., Burns, E., & Jones, T. (2025). LGBTQ+ student, staff, and parent perceptions of Australian school climates. The Australian Educational Researcher, 52, 973 to 995. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-024-00749-6

Mathews, B., Finkelhor, D., Pacella, R., Scott, J. G., Higgins, D. J., Meinck, F., Erskine, H. E., Thomas, H. J., Lawrence, D., Malacova, E., Haslam, D. M., & Collin-Vézina, D. (2024). Child sexual abuse by different classes and types of perpetrator: Prevalence and trends from an Australian national survey. Child Abuse & Neglect, 147, Article 106562. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2023.106562

National Office for Child Safety. (n.d.). Who perpetrates child sexual abuse? Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.childsafety.gov.au/about-child-sexual-abuse/who-perpetrates-child-sexual-abuse

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. (2021). National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. https://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-Revised-Standard-Version-Updated-Edition-NRSVue-Bible/

Our Watch. (2021). Respectful relationships education: A whole-school approach. Retrieved 3 September 2026, from https://www.ourwatch.org.au/

Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. (2017). Final report: Religious institutions (Vol. 16). Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/final-report

St Andrew’s Cathedral School. (n.d.). Wellbeing and character. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.sacs.nsw.edu.au/in-the-classroom/how-our-students-learn/character/

St Andrew’s Cathedral School. (2024, June). The heart of wellbeing. Inspired, 4, 4 to 5. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.sacs.nsw.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2024-Inspired-MAY-FA-DIGITAL-LR.pdf

St Andrew’s Cathedral School. (2026, June 10). Parents engage in powerful conversations on ‘Disrupting the Manosphere’. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.sacs.nsw.edu.au/blog/2026/06/parents-engage-in-powerful-conversations-on-disrupting-the-manosphere/

State Coroner’s Court of New South Wales. (2025, November 27). Inquest into the deaths of Lilie James and Paul Thijssen. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://coroners.nsw.gov.au/documents/findings/2025/Inquest_into_the_deaths_of_Lilie_James_and_Paul_Thijssen.pdf

Yates, M. S., Fitzsimmons, T. W., Callan, V. J., & Green, T. (2025). Beliefs about the origins and achievement of gender equality: A qualitative inquiry among adolescents attending elite single-sex schools. Sex Roles, 91, Article 73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-025-01620-3

Limits of the evidence

Australian studies of elite or faith-based boys’ schools are mostly qualitative and non-comparative. They identify plausible cultural mechanisms. They do not establish that private or religious schooling independently causes misogyny or sexual violence.

The public incident file is not a representative sample and does not establish comparative offending rates between school sectors. Current charges are allegations unless and until determined by a court.

The Australian Child Maltreatment Study identifies a cohort shift towards more adolescent-inflicted sexual harm. It does not establish that algorithms caused the shift or that every adolescent perpetrator was male.

St Andrew’s character and wellbeing initiatives are documented in school-produced material. Without an independent outcome evaluation, the evidence establishes claims about program content and implementation rather than changes in attitudes or behaviour.