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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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.

That is worth celebrating for the many hundreds of students, and their families and teachers, whose achievements are now accurately recorded by MySchool.

But viewed from a wider perspective, this story raises serious questions.

How it is that this incorrect data was not picked up for years? MySchool is a data dashboard which gives vital information about how our schools are travelling. It provides evidence to test the stories we tell ourselves about our own and other’s achievements.  For that reason alone we should be concerned that a major mistake on MySchool was not noticed for years.

Now let’s see what might be learned from the corrected data. If we want students at the colleges to complete VET certificates, is 1,199 a good number? MySchool tells us this is 38% of the colleges’ total 2015 Year12/13 class. The same statistic for Rooty Hill High is 45%, while for the set of 25 interstate public schools similar to Rooty Hill the average was 77%. Now 1,199 does not look like a number to celebrate after all, since double that would place us just below average performance in equipping our senior secondary students with VET qualifications.

What about the Year12 certificate? Do the colleges do better here? MySchool tells us that 2,190 students at our colleges gained their TCE in 2015, 70% of the Year12/13 class. That looks better. But the same figure for Rooty Hill is 100%, and for the 25 similar schools it is 94%. Our colleges would need another 750 TCE graduates to be just average on this measure.

That really matters, as our schools’ core mission is to provide young Tasmanians with the knowledge and skills they need to make their way in their future world. Even in today’s world, that means getting at least a Year12 or VET certificate. That’s what schools elsewhere are aiming for and getting closer to achieving. We are making progress too, but change is still resisted and the need for it denied by advocates for the status quo. MySchool shows just how wrongheaded that is.

Some have argued that MySchool comparisons are not fair. Not comparing ‘apples with apples’ they say. This won’t work for VET qualifications, which are nationally consistent, but might it be the explanation for the missing 750 plus TCE graduates? Have we set the bar for the TCE too high? Let’s run the measuring stick over that myth.

Our Year 12 authority, the TASC, says that in 2015 just 50.4% of the young people who could have been doing year 12 got their TCE, while only 222 students, some 3% of the cohort, completed the equivalent of years 11 and 12 without gaining their certificate. Clearly the problem is not that we have set the TCE bar too high, but that that almost half our young people do not complete their run up.

Is that what happens elsewhere in communities like ours?

Let’s look again at Rooty Hill. It’s in the western Sydney electorate of Mt Druitt, held by Labor since its creation in 1971. Around half of Rooty Hill’s students come from non-English speaking backgrounds, and 60% are below or well below the NSW grade average when they enrol. It has the same Index of Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA – a measure which predicts NAPLAN performance based mainly on parents’ education and employment), as Burnie, Devonport, Kings Meadows and Queechy High Schools. New Town, Ogilvie and Rose Bay are higher. So Rooty Hill is hardly an unfair comparison for our colleges. But as MySchool shows, they are leaving us way behind with retention from year 10 to year 12 above their state average and 100% of their year 12s gaining the HSC.

Not that they are satisfied with that, as you can see online from their Annual Report. Their goal is to have 90% of their Year12s go on to further education and training, including 40% to uni, because that’s what students at Rooty Hill need for future success. And that’s what young Tasmanians need too.

So yes, MySchool’s data dashboard did give the wrong reading on the ‘VET certificates completed gauge’, causing quite a stir. But what should we learn from this? Not to trust data? That MySchool is not important? Or that our educational leaders should be more outward looking, using MySchool regularly to benchmark our schools against other schools that might provide models for improvement? Clearly, that has not been occurring. Hopefully the kerfuffle about this VET data will encourage more attention to published performance data in the future.

 

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About Michael Rowan

About Eleanor Ramsay

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

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