Heard on the Hill Term 3, Week 7

Bonjour à tous, and Wanju

Thank you to Andrew and the Leadership team for covering for me while I was away. 

Senior Schooling reform is clearly on the Minister of Education's agenda. I will be attending a consultation group on 15 September and I am keen to hear your thoughts and pass them on, particularly if they differ from our current focus. 

Here are my thoughts on Senior School. It is an extract from something that I wrote for another audience, apologies for the length of it. I hope that it provides thought and discussion for you.

A Senior School Revolution

The stage is set in Western Australia for systematic revolution of senior schooling. It starts with small things. The Tertiary Institutions Services Centre announced in 2022 that it would no longer calculate a school's median ATAR. This small step has robbed the state media outlets of the opportunity to access and rank schools based on the median ATAR of their current cohort of Year 12 students.

You may ask, “what is so bad with this?”. Internally as information for an individual school nothing. Within a school, you could compare the median ATAR to the students' Year 9 achievement data and analyse if they have made reasonable progress and attained the expected result. Using it as comparative data though is problematic. The data does not consider the variation in successive cohorts from year to year. Pitting one school against another is like comparing apples to oranges.

In an environment where the median score is producing “league tables” based on median ATAR results, the last thing a school wants is to appear languishing at the bottom of said table. The stigma, real or not leaves schools with myriad of problems that provide diminishing returns.  Academically able students choose other schools, and quality teachers look for and are hired by more prestigious schools. Consequently schools, overtly and covertly, engineer the composition of their ATAR cohort to maintain a particular median ATAR. Without a publicly available median ATAR score for comparison between schools, greater freedom of course selection is possible for students. This will lead to more students engaging with ATAR courses, (but not necessarily an ATAR pathway).  Currently, Western Australia has the second lowest engagement rate in Australia at about 32%.

No calculation of a school's median ATAR and hence no “league table” is not the most important change to fuel the revolution but it had to be the first step.

Step two is being driven by the University entrance requirements.  Almost simultaneously the University of Western Australia released to the public that it would be changing its entrance requirements for most of its courses (it’s important to note here not all courses). The process is based on points acquired from a mixture of traditional and non-traditional sources. ATAR courses, General study courses, completed AQF certificate II-IV, University enabling units, achievement in sports at the elite, sub-elite and developmental level, achievement of level 5 and level 7 of AMEB as well as other verified work experience and community volunteering.

Again, this move by UWA to open the entrance requirement has allowed schools the space to diversify the combination of their course offerings to students. It presents students with possible pathways not confined to either ATAR or Vocational. Pathways that allow for academic challenge, nationally recognised skills and work and community experience that offer real educational and vocational currency.

Currently to receive an ATAR score a student must study at least 4 ATAR courses and complete an external exam. It is possible to complete 1, 2 or even 3 ATAR courses but there are associated problems with these students who have no vested interest in the score received from an external examination. There is the potential for their performance to adversely affect the other students' scores through the scaling calculations. Hence most schools limit the number of students studying less than 4 ATAR courses, even when the students have the interest, motivation, and academic potential to succeed in that 1 course. When you put the UWA entrance requirement change together with the removal of the publicised league table based on the school's median ATAR, the door is open for student engagement in ATAR courses to increase.  Schools will become less concerned about their median ATAR score and more concerned about the educational value each course has for an individual student.

It is possible to make a correlation of university potential from the Year 9 NAPLAN data. This is something that DoE is currently trailing to measure a school’s performance of outcome against potential. Of course, this metric does not consider the aspiration or in some cases the lack of aspiration to go to university. More work needs to be done both; in schools to develop this aspiration and; in universities to make courses relevant to students. 

The Western Australian Certificate of Education is awarded to students who have

WACE requirements.

• Complete a minimum of 20 units or equivalents (endorsed units)
• Literacy and Numeracy achievement through Band 8 or higher in NAPLAN in Year 9 or successfully complete the Online Literacy and Numeracy Assessment.
• Breadth and Depth - four units of post Year 10 English, two in Year 12. A minimum of 10 units or equivalent, one pair of units from each List A and List B.
• Achieve 14 C grades or equivalent
• A maximum of 4-unit equivalents in Year 11 and 4-unit equivalents in Year 12.

Schools work hard to ensure that students can complete the requirements to achieve a WACE. The education system in Western Australia measures a school’s success on its ability to do this. In fact, it is a system metric. However, the WACE requirements often come into conflict with course offerings that are relevant to student interest and their pathway to success.

Senior School became compulsory in 2008. As a reaction to research that showed that students who completed Year 12 were more likely to be successful beyond school. When you think about what schools offered at that point in time, what was available through training organisations and the availability of online learning, the research reached a natural conclusion. The question is; “Is this research still valid with the options that are available to young people now?” 

Let’s dream for a minute. Imagine if the rules about what was offered to senior school students were not limited by principals, too scared to let anyone study an ATAR course or to a set of rules that is going to describe what constitutes the completion of senior school by an external agency (SCSA), or by pathways limited to academic or vocational. Surely, a student who has gathered enough educational and/or vocational currency would have the capacity to succeed. Not by an arbitrary timeline, of completing Year 12, but by the gathering of the currency for success they need to move forward. 

So, here is the final hurdle to be cleared and perhaps the largest one. It will take a monumental leap of faith by the Schools and Curriculum and Standards Authority and the Western Australian Department of Education, to either let go of the WACE certificate as the penultimate measure of future success of students or completely re-design it to ensure that it holds more currency for students, higher education, business, and industry. The current state achievement for the WACE is 89% of eligible students. When compared to the whole cohort who start in Year 7 the attainment rate drops to 64%. The Attainment rate (ATAR>55 or a CERT II or higher + WACE) was a good attempt to quantify a student’s Senior Secondary success beyond a WACE achievement.

In the future, unless the WACE holds more currency, by differentiation of achievement, to employers and higher educational institutions, I can see schools only paying lip service to the metric as a measure of school success. This raises a bigger question for the Western Australian Department of Education if not the WACE – then what would be its measure of systemic success?

Some would say that it is all or nothing. I don’t believe that this is true. SCSA has the power and now the urgency required for the necessary reform to expand the contributions toward the achievement of a systemic measure of senior school completion. Engaging business, industry, and higher academic institutions to identify the education currency required to move past school is the first step to creating the flexibility schools need to reimage their senior school structures pathways and course offerings, without devaluing or endangering the WACE. These changes have the power to transform not just senior schooling but the academic and vocational capacity of our society.

En Avant