Page 3820 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 September 2018
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But, as my motion also goes on to highlight, in the past three years at least there have been no fewer than four reports all independently researched that paint a serious picture of academic underperformance in our schools.
The first, prepared by Professor Stephen Lamb, was commissioned by the ACT Education Directorate. That report says on page 4:
State and Territory results show that after taking account of intake and context differences, ACT government schools on average achieve negative results on every measure.
That is pretty damning. However, I cannot tell if it is the least or most alarming finding in the report, because large swathes of it are blacked out, and that is the report that this supposedly openly transparent government has published on its directorate website.
Neither can I say what recommendations Professor Lamb made to the ACT government because they also appear to be redacted. In fact, the report is so sensitive that even the header which generally sets out the title of the report is redacted. So much for openness and transparency in our education system. If this was not bad enough, the most alarming thing is that there appears to be little evidence that the ACT government took any notice of the findings in the report.
In fact, the Lamb report was not the first to raise alarm bells about just how good or otherwise ACT schools were. The Australia Institute presented their paper to the ACT government in 2015, but the authors made it public in 2017 out of sheer frustration that the government was doing nothing with it and nothing about what they saw as how badly well-off Canberra schools fared against corresponding schools of similar socioeconomic profiles. In fact, they suggested that in 41 per cent of cases ACT schools were significantly below other schools.
At the time of the public release in July last year the Australia Institute’s Andrew Macintosh said the ACT government’s ongoing future of education community conversation was not enough. The Canberra Times quoted him as saying:
Given that things are getting worse, there is a desperate need for a public, detailed inquiry to find out exactly what is going on.
The Australia Institute suggested two possible explanations for poor results in the public system: the socioeconomic scores used by the Australian Curriculum and reporting authority, ACARA, did not capture the true profile of the ACT making the comparisons inaccurate; or teaching practices were to blame.
The government ignored those findings and ignored the call for a detailed public inquiry to find out what is going on. So last Friday the same Professor Macintosh reiterated his frustration, again calling for more research to be done to come to grips with the causes of underperformance in ACT schools.
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