Page 1881 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 22 August 2007
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where the political parties stand on this issue. The continued success of our education system is a fundamental issue.
I support continuous assessment because it provides a high degree of integrity in the assessment process. It allows for the assessment of a broad range of knowledge, understanding and skills over an extended period of time. In contrast, and as previous speakers have alluded to, external exams are a one-off, point-in-time assessment that focus on mastery of content and encourage recall and regurgitation of fact. Most importantly—and you see this in the system where it operates—it encourages teachers who teach to the test. They do not teach a broad set of educational skills; they teach the students how to pass the test. That is just an unacceptable intrusion from the federal government into the business of the ACT.
To provide a bit of background as to how this has come about, at the ministerial council meeting in July of 2006, the council agreed that Victoria would chair a working party of its senior education officials, the state and territory education departments and the commonwealth, to examine the feasibility of a common scale for reporting all senior secondary subject results and to examine a quality assurance mechanism that would ensure consistency of results in senior secondary certificates across Australia. So all states and territories signed up to that.
At the MCEETYA meeting in April this year, we were presented with a progress report and a series of recommendations that the ministerial council adopted. That was to note the progress of the senior officials’ feasibility study, to support the approach of the working party on senior secondary reporting in conducting a feasibility study into development of a common five-point scale through an initial trial in four subject areas—English, mathematics, chemistry and French—and that possible approaches to drama would also be examined, and then to note that the working party would provide a final report out of session to MCEETYA. That is the background to this.
Then on budget night we got from Minister Bishop a one-liner in her media release where she said that she would require all states and territories to introduce external examinations if they wanted any commonwealth funding in the next round of the funding agreement. I wrote to Minister Bishop seeking clarification of her comments. Her response was:
I am aware that currently the ACT operates a system of school-based assessment in the senior years of schooling … The Australian Government, through the new schools funding agreement, will require all jurisdictions to include some form of rigorous end-of-course public examinations …
Initial conversations between my department and the federal department indicate that the federal minister has not quite communicated to her departmental officials what form this will take. We are told that the absolute minimum will be at least 30 per cent of a student’s final mark towards a year 12 certificate—not just university entrance but towards a year 12 certificate. That is the background out of MCEETYA, which is where this comes from. It is all year 12 certificates.
The federal minister wanted to scrap all state and territory year 12 certificates and have one Australian certificate of education. Of course, she failed miserably to get any
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