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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (14 June) . . Page.. 1765 ..
MR BERRY (continuing):
Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I refer to another article. The Sydney Morning Herald of 9 January 1997 had this to say:
Students and teachers hit back yesterday over the low TER results at Mount Druitt High School, which were highlighted in a front-page media report.
I will read a few of the quotes from some of the students and some of the teachers. The article continued:
But the school's principal, Ms June Richards, said she felt "humiliated" over a report in the Daily Telegraph highlighting the school's TER record-the highest score was 44.4.
Sarah Chalmers, 17, who has just completed her HSC at Mount Druitt High says she got a bit weepy when she showed up to her part-time job yesterday and other young staff teased her by chanting "failure".
Well, why wouldn't you get a bit weepy if somebody did that to you? The article continued:
"It was really embarrassing when people teased me," said Sarah, who wants to be a hairdresser.
"But I wasn't aiming for a high TER. I want to start work and I've been really happy at school. The teachers have been really willing to help me, even after hours."
That is the sort of thing that can happen to kids. They can be branded when somebody has been astute enough to pull together all of these figures and draw conclusions about the performance levels between schools. The article also states:
Shaun Juckes, 18, who starts an engineering course this week, said he was worried the controversy over the school's TER results would prejudice employers.
I think he meant employees-
"People are saying, 'Oh, you guys are the dumb ones from Mount Druitt'," he said.
Young people can be cruel sometimes and this is what we want to avoid. He said:
"But a lot of us didn't go for a high mark, we didn't need one."
That does not matter because the results are collected, these comparisons are drawn, and often people discriminate quite unfairly. The damage can be very permanent to a school. Imagine yourself as a parent entering your bright young student into, say, years 7, 8 or 9 at a high school and all of a sudden, because of the exposure of figures which have nothing to do with the quality of education for individual students, you see some ugly comparison between that school and another school.
Mrs Burke: What? How do you-
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