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.
