Page 1873 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 22 August 2007
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Perhaps most significantly, Ms Bishop has failed to recognise that overhauling a long-established education system and making external testing compulsory by 1 January 2009 is unworkable. Developing and implementing such a significant change to the ACT’s assessment arrangements without sufficient time to develop an appropriate system of assessment and address any impact that it might have on students is unreasonable.
As the federal opposition spokesman on education, Stephen Smith, said recently, such a fundamental change to senior schooling in the ACT requires time to educate and inform students, parents and teachers to ensure that the implementation of change does not jeopardise individual students or the system generally. This sentiment was further expressed by the Australian Education Union’s Penny Gilmour. Ms Gilmour has shown support for the broad range of subjects offered in the college system and broad range of assessments that allow teachers to assess for learning. She warned that the imposition of an HSC-type test would result in a narrowing of the curriculum and a reduced subject range.
Ms Gilmour told the Canberra Times on 2 August this year that, in order for the ACT to comply with the request for external exams to receive $30 million in recurrent funding in 2009, the curriculum would need to be changed next year to accommodate year 11 students going into the exam in 2009. This would mean the ACT had less than six months to scrap its existing, long-established and successful assessment model and replace it with a completely new external examination model. On top of that, we would need to educate students, parents and teachers about the changes and try to assess the impact those changes may have. This is not only impractical and unrealistic but also completely unsupported in the community.
The ACT government’s top priority is to ensure high quality education for all students, and our unique college system and assessment model provides this. Our standalone college system is one of the most successful in the country and caters for all students, whether they wish to go to university, enter the workforce or undertake further vocational education and training. The independent college review commissioned by the Stanhope government investigated the strengths of the college system and found that both students and teachers benefited from the non-confrontational environment that characterised student-teacher relationships.
All ACT government colleges operate as registered training organisations for the delivery of vocational education and training programs, and work experience also plays an important role in our secondary system. I have a work experience student from Calwell High School in my office at the moment. John Rivers is in year 10 and he expressed the following views to me on continuous assessment:
As a high school student that will be entering the ACT College system next year, I believe that continuous assessment in classes encourages learning at a higher level and delivers a more accurate representation of a student’s abilities.
I do not believe that a one-off assessment, the like of which has been proposed by the Federal Minister for Education, would deliver a higher standard of education for me or my fellow students.
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