Faith based schools are one of the fastest growing areas of Australian education. What characterises these school is the intention to base the school on a particular faith tradition, but still operate within the overall structure of Australian schooling. The paper has two main dimensions. Firstly an investigation into the uniqueness of Australian funding arrangements, their history and the impact of current neo-liberal funding for faith based schooling in Australia. This is then linked to religiosity whereby religiosity is seen in terms of economic and social capital and where Australian Catholic schools have become largely the schools of choice for the aspirational middle class. Australian education is unique when compared to other systems such as the UK, the US or Europe where religious schools are either included within the state system or fully private and reliant on fees (Kuyk et al 2007). In Australia faith based schools are almost fully funded by State and Commonwealth governments yet are largely independent in terms of governance and curriculum. Historically the arguments for this funding model were centred around freedom of religious expression and most importantly Labor Party politics (Albinski 1966) and a largely Irish working class (Kelly 2009), since most church schools were Catholic. However, changing Commonwealth policy schifts and neo-liberal discourse since 1980s have entrenched the notion of 'private' schooling and choice. Within the quasi marketsw of so-called 'private' schooling, faith based schools are positioned and understood through a rhetoric of choice (Marginson 1997), particularly where choice is the obsession of the urban middle classes. The paper also argues that since Australian society has become more secular religion is seen in more instrumental terms rather than being related to cosmic order or as a tool box of therapeutic techniques that can be adapted to serve individual needs. Religion and its associated moral values are identified as something useful for others to have, and parents are keen to embrace this on behalf of their children. Parents are identifying aspects of schooling such as discipline and order as proividing social and cultural capital and of providing later access to economic capital (Bourdieu 1997). Catholiic schools in particular have a growing share of this market and are identified as providing desirable forms of social capital and opportunities for social mobility rather than dogma or religious certainty. Indeed Catholic schols are turning to market research to better position their schools, and this research has indicated that faith and religiosity score poorly in regards to parents motivation for selecting such a school, while acknowledging that less affluent and less socially positioned Catholics are not accessing Catholic schools

Ethnographic studies of two Catholic schools, one in the aspirational suburbs of Sydney's north-west, the other in the gentrifying suburbs of the inner city.

Studies of both schools indicated that choice was related to access to social and economic capital. Choice of school was linked to social mobility and the acquistion of social capital through the acquisition of values, discipline and through the establishment of social networks due to a strong sense of community within the schools rather than through religiosity or faith.