Page 2832 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 24 June 2009
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(b) to outline how the performance monitoring system will operate and what guidelines will be put in place to ensure:
(i) privacy will be protected as outlined in the MCEETYA agreement the Minister signed in December 2008; and
(ii) harm is not caused to school communities through the publication of school league tables created with this information.
Madam Deputy Speaker, the ACT Greens are concerned that the publication of information which effectively compares schools based on student assessment programs, attendance and student and teacher numbers in what are known as league tables will have a significant impact on our education system here and across Australia. As part of the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians at the Ministerial Council for Education, Employment and Youth Affairs in December 2008, education ministers agreed, among other things, to the following:
… the community should have access to information that enables an understanding of the decisions taken by governments and the status and performance of schooling in Australia, to ensure schools are accountable for the results they achieve with the public funding the receive, and governments are accountable for the decisions they take.
This includes access to national reporting on the performance of all schools, contextual information and information about individual schools’ enrolment profile.
Parents, families and the community should have access to information about the performance of their school compared to schools with similar characteristics. Australian governments will work together to achieve nationally comparable reporting about schools.
Under the agreement—and this is consistent with advice we have had from briefings with the ACT Department of Education and Training—the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, ACARA, will publish nationally a profile of each school in Australia on a central website. Each profile is to include a range of school results, such as average score on literacy and numeracy tests and average improvement over time.
Already we have seen how easy it is to collect this data from each school and compile national and state or territory league tables. On 6 May 2009 the Hobart Mercury published a league table of school results. The government had published results online and these were then converted by the newspaper to show school rankings—all of this in spite of an undertaking in the Melbourne declaration, which stated:
… in providing information on schooling, governments will ensure that school-based information is published responsibly so that any public comparisons of schools will be fair, contain accurate and verified data, contextual information and a range of indicators.
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