Page 2833 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 24 June 2009
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Like many educational organisations, the ACT Greens support the need for transparency in the education system and have no problem with the aims of the Melbourne declaration. It is unfortunate, Madam Deputy Speaker, that the Melbourne declaration was not agreed earlier than December 2008. The declaration states:
… 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 they receive, and governments are accountable for the decisions they take.
Had this been the case prior to our school closures, perhaps we in the community may have been provided with the information needed in relation to these closures.
It is the lack of safeguards around this new, more accountable approach and the system of comparisons of school performance that we are drawing to the attention of the Assembly through this motion. I am asking the minister to address this with his colleagues, here and nationally.
Despite the fact that the Melbourne declaration states that governments will not themselves devise simplistic league tables or rankings and privacy will be protected, we have seen in Tasmania, with the publication of the comparative information in the Mercury, that others do this from the data provided by government. It can be done.
Last week, on 19 June, the New South Wales State government introduced a bill to lift its 10-year ban on the creation of school league tables. The New South Wales regulation preventing publication of school league tables using exam test scores is the only one of its kind in Australia. This regulation was introduced several years ago due to an incident involving the publication of school results that singled out one particular school. It prevents the public release of student results in a way that ranks or otherwise compares the results of particular schools. This has prevented the publication of school league tables using raw, HSC and basic skill test results and university entrance rankings for the past 10 years.
The New South Wales education minister, Verity Firth, said that, despite the state government’s previous opposition to the public release of comparable data, New South Wales was required under the national education agreement to provide national literacy and numeracy test data to the commonwealth. The President of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, has said that if New South Wales changes its legislation preventing league tables, it would only be a matter of time before they appeared across the country. Teachers have said that changes would not prevent the creation of league tables using data from the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority website, which will provide parents with results for every school in the country later this year.
It appears, therefore, that unless some safeguards are put in place nationally by the ministers who signed up to the Melbourne declaration, comparative data or league tables will likely be published. Teachers and principals consider that even after the education ministers met in Tasmania on 12 June 2009 and adopted a set of principles
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