Submission to the Independent Education Review Introduction I am very pleased that Minister Palmer has established this Review. Together with Dr Lisa Denny and Saul Eslake, I was a proponent of the Open Letter which called for a review of education in Tasmania. To make our case we used data from the most recent Productivity […]
MySchool and the colleges: setting the VET record straight
A letter to the Editor we wrote in May last year stirred up a hornets’ nest. We used data from MySchool to compare the VET outcomes from the Tasmanian senior secondary colleges with high schools in other states, claiming that in 2014 the colleges achieved just 54 completions at Certificate ll or above, while 86 students at Rooty Hill High School in Sydney’s western suburbs achieved this goal.
Fifty four VET graduates from all of the colleges did look hard to believe, but the importance of MySchool as a source of information for the community made it harder to believe that the number was wrong. Especially as it was consistent with a declining trend in the numbers reported right back to 2010. Surely such a mistake would have been noticed and corrected immediately it was published. But it turns out it was wrong, and the data for the last few years was corrected late last year. For the record, a total of 1,392 VET certificates at level ll or above were completed by college students in 2014, and 1,199 in 2015.
Benchmarking Tasmanian NAPLAN and Year 12 attainment rates
We have a double inequality in the outcomes from the Tasmanian public schooling system. First, and as in the rest of the country, students in our more advantaged schools are achieving much better outcomes than students in schools at the other end of the scale. That is the Gonski Gap, the problem Gonski funding is designed to fix. But then we also have inequality between the senior secondary attainment of students in our government system compared with students attending similar schools in other states, regardless of whether they are attending an advantaged or a disadvantaged school. This is the TASki Gap. That is a problem we in Tasmania need to fix.
The Great TCE Completion Conundrum
When we first became aware that most Tasmanian young people were not completing their year 12 certificates, the ordinary expectation of students in other states, we wondered whether there might be something wrong with our senior secondary certificate – the Tasmanian Certificate of Education (TCE). Might Tasmania have made its TCE too hard?
TASMANIA’S YEAR 12 RESULTS: WE CAN DO MUCH BETTER
We’ve all used the old saying ’Pigs might fly’ when some one suggests something might happen and we don’t believe that it can. In some – just a very few, actually – of our discussions with people about Tasmania’s low rate of year 12 completion, and what might be done to improve it, we have got the sense they really wanted to say ‘Pigs might fly’, but were too polite to do so. But we can show – in pictures – that many more Tasmanian high school students are well capable of getting their year 12 certificates than do so now. Just look at their year 9 NAPLAN performance, compared to other states, and then at our year 12 completion rate, compared to other states. The others are all close together, while there is a gulf between ours as wide as – but surely not to be explained by – Bass Strait. We need to look at this data, learn what we can from it, and fill that gap as fast as we can.