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As education costs continue to rise, Australian governments spend $71.5 billion on education and childcare services, according to a new report.
School is back and parents across the country are busy making sure uniforms fit, books have name labels on them and lunches are packed ready to be eaten by hungry students.
And while everyone knows education is important, it can also be a costly exercise with mums and dads spending more than just their spare pocket money on making sure the next generation's leaders have everything they need to get through the day.
In previous years results from the nationwide Clarks Back to School Saver Survey of 1,000 parents suggest that parents spend an average of $600 per child in order to make sure their kids are ready for the new school year.
And the findings are similar to those produced by The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM), with the organisation saying parents spend an average amount of $50,000 on education and child care.
But more recently it has become increasingly apparent that parents are not the only people spending big when it comes to teaching young people, as the 2012 annual Report on Government Services, released on Tuesday (January 31), has found that the majority of the government's education spending is dedicated to schools.
Of the $71.5 billion allocated to training young people in 2009-10 roughly a quarter of the total budget made it into the country's many universities.
Researchers also found that more and more people are utilising federally funded child care services, with estimates that a million children under the age of twelve attend these centres.
Early childhood education is also on the agenda for people living in the nation's territories and 117,615 young people attended state funded centres in these areas, while their peers in preschool reach around 224, 699.
For many parents making the decision to enrol their kids in preschool can be difficult, but it is one that the report suggests may improve their performance on key indicators when they finally graduate to primary education.
The report found that more than 77 per cent of the nation's young people have the basic language and cognitive skills they need to make a successful go of life when they make the transition from preschool or childcare to primary school.
A major part of this relatively high rating may come from the hard work and long hours that parents put into their kids, with statistics suggesting that almost half of all children between the age of three and eight were read to daily.
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