Education Ambassadors | Tasmania

Education Ambassadors is a voluntary, community based organization encouraging all young people in Tasmania to dream big and stay at school to get the skills and knowledge to realize their dreams. The Ambassadors are community leaders of all kinds who stand up for the importance of education for all our young people, in all communities, and for the State as a whole. We are committed to encouraging evidence-informed, open, respectful, and non-partisan discussion of the current challenges facing education in the State.

For personal as well as other reasons I have wound up the Education Ambassadors project. I am grateful for the support of those who were willing to be patrons of the organisation, and ambassadors, especially for their championing the simple idea that all of Tasmania’s young people should have access to a full 12 years of education.

I will continue to argue the case for reforming Tasmania’s education system, and I would welcome the continued support of all who took part in Education Ambassadors, but I accept that even if just by association with me, the Patrons and Ambassadors might unwillingly be engaged in the controversy that attends the most obviously needed reform of senior secondary education in our state – the end of the separate high school and college system.

Accordingly I have amended this site to remove the names of the Patrons and the Ambassadors, while leaving the contributions made by the persons whose thoughts you may read below. Any views expressed on this site in the future, as in the past, should be taken to be the views of the authors alone, and not be attributed to others.

Michael Rowan

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Ulverstone High pioneers tell their senior secondary stories

November 15, 2017 By Rena Henderson

I am taking this is opportunity to provide the Education Ambassadors a good news story about one high school in the North-West which had sufficient support from parents, staff and community to be confident in taking the chance to extend to Years 11 and 12.  The decision was backed by the School Association Committee, of which I am the Chairperson.  While the staff were busy playing their part in the process, the School Association saw the opportunity to invite community and business organisations to support some Pioneer Scholarships.  These would act as incentivised encouragement and an eventual reward for some of the first group of 11/12 pioneer students to not only complete those two years at their school but to also attain a TCE at the end.  The school is Ulverstone High School, and nine students successfully applied for the UHS Pioneer Scholarships worth $1000 each, a unique initiative for a unique school!

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MySchool and the colleges: setting the VET record straight

March 9, 2017 By Michael Rowan and Eleanor Ramsay

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.

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Benchmarking Tasmanian NAPLAN and Year 12 attainment rates

July 26, 2016 By Michael Rowan and Eleanor Ramsay

Taski Gonski

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.

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TASMANIA’S YEAR 12 RESULTS: WE CAN DO MUCH BETTER

January 23, 2015 By Michael Rowan and Eleanor Ramsay

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.

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Circular Head Council reflects on 15 years of support for education

August 1, 2014 By Daryl Quilliam JP

These are exciting times for education in Circular Head. We have a number of top class educational facilities including an Agricultural College, established to capitalise on the rapid growth anticipated in the local dairy industry. Our Council also administers and funds a special committee dedicated to pursuing and promoting the growing education and training opportunities […]

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Latrobe: Council/school connections develop leadership all round

June 30, 2014 By Mike Gaffney

As both the Mayor of Latrobe and MLC for Mersey, I’ve been able to put into practice my firm beliefs that our schools are most successful when they are actively supported by the community, and that one of the most important roles of community leaders is to be powerful champions for our schools. Community based learning is definitely a two way relationship and a strategy of engagement which I am passionate about.

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Mayor Martin joins Education Ambassadors

June 29, 2014 By Steve Martin

The recent news about education in Tasmania has not been all good, with concerns about both young peoples’ and adults’ literacy and numeracy, and the lower proportion of our young people completing year 12 compared to the rest of Australia.

But according to Professors Eleanor Ramsay and Michael Rowan, a closer look at the data shows that Tasmania is not so different to the other states, at least until year ten, and after that the gap can be closed if we challenge our young people to dream big and stay at school to get the knowledge and skills they need to realise their dreams.

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Smarter State of Affairs is Possible

May 22, 2014 By Graham Bury

Nothing is more important than education to our local communities’ health, economic competitiveness and resilience.  Education is the most powerful, the most effective and in fact the only way to reverse a cycle of poor health, poverty, underemployment and disadvantage into an upward spiral of hope, jobs and achievement, for individuals, for communities, and indeed and for the State as a whole.

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About Education Ambassadors

Education Ambassadors are community leaders who stand up for the importance of education for all our young people, in all communities, and for the State as a whole. We are committed to encouraging evidence-informed, open, respectful, and non-partisan discussion of the current challenges facing education in the State. We encourage all young people in Tasmania to dream big and stay at school to get the skills and knowledge to realize their dreams. And we will be successful when many more students complete their year 12 certificate, and go on to do the thousand different things that will shape a better future for Tasmania.

Did you know?

  • Eulogy for Eleanor Mary Ramsay – Eleanor led a wonderful life, full of achievement. Here is her story as I know it.
  • Eleanor Mary Ramsay scholarship – A scholarship has been established to honour and continue Eleanor’s work.
  • Response to ACER Review of education 9 to 12 – We look at the Review in detail and find some interesting new data, many old confusions, and a few valuable suggestions.
  • Education, productivity and economic performance: Tasmania, then, now and tomorrow – The 29th John West Memorial Lecture, by Saul Eslake. Just as good as you would expect.
  • Using MySchool to benchmark senior secondary schooling in Tasmania – The paper explains in detail the data we use to compare Tasmanian schools and colleges with similar schools in other states in relation to NAPLAN and Year 12 attainment, shows the comparisons in graphs, and considers possible explanations of the results.
  • Benchmarks For Year 12 Research Paper – Data set for benchmarking Tasmanian schools’ year 9 NAPLAN and senior secondary certificate attainment rates against similar schools in other states. Corrections will be welcomed. Please email contact@educationambassadors.org.au
  • Senior Secondary Certificate requirements in all states – TCE, VCE, HCE, etc: what’s the difference?
  • What did happen after the high school leavers dinner? – What can we learn from the year 12 graduation rates of Tasmanian high schools?
  • Will Losing Pathway Planners Take us Forward? – The State budget cut the Pathway Planners. Is this about dollars, or (good) sense? Garry Bailey looks for evidence the new plan will work and finds it lacking.
  • Tasmanian Colleges: fit for purpose? – Until year 10 Tasmanian students are doing about as well as similar students in similar schools in the other states. What is going wrong after that?
  • A Note on Tasmanian Retention and Attainment – How many young Tasmanians are completing secondary school?
  • Tasmanian Education Today: digging around in the data – We review the latest data from NAPLAN and PISA tests, and show that Tasmanian students are doing about as well as their inter-state counterparts. Until we get beyond year 10, then big issues emerge that we must deal with to do justice to our kids’ ability
  • Learning to Change Tasmania – Tasmanian education in a national and international context. What are our options for change?
  • Stanley School turns 100

Useful Links

  • 26TEN
  • Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER)
  • Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority (ACARA)
  • Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
  • TasLearn
  • Tasmanian Qualifications Authority
  • The Tasmanian Department of Education

Post Categories

  • Education
  • North-West Schools
  • Retention
  • School retention
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  • Year 12 completion
  • Youth

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Eleanor Ramsay and Michael Rowan
contact@educationambassadors.org.au

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