Page 2840 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 24 June 2009
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attention is already paid to the responsible use of data that measures the performance of Australian schools. I understand that the data collected will be provided to the national data repository which is housed by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority—ACARA—and that ACARA is tasked with providing the governance of this resource.
Many of the concerns raised by Ms Hunter are covered in detail in a document of the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, Principles and protocols for reporting on schooling in Australia. I will quote a very brief part of a detailed 10 to 12-page report:
Responsible use of data measuring the performance of Australian schools
Ministers are aware that under Australia’s new school reporting framework, a greater range of data on individual schools will be publicly released. With the release of this information, Ministers are committed to reporting which is fair and accurate, and that:
• information approved for publication on schools contains accurate and verified data, contextual information and a range of indicators to provide a more reliable and complete view of performance
• protects the privacy of individual students
• governments will not publish simplistic league tables or rankings, and will put in place strategies to manage the risk that third parties may seek to produce such tables or rankings.
We do agree with the premise that the new system will not help people to rank schools according to test scores. We also observe that most of the data we are referring to can already be obtained through freedom of information, and the proposed league tables provide information that parents want—information about how their son or daughter is performing at school.
The opposition have always placed great importance on giving the best possible opportunities for our school children. Federally, a wide variety of policy approaches have been put forward over time targeted to the challenge of improving teacher quality. These include merit or performance pay, payment by student examination results, raising entry standards to teaching, higher teacher pay generally, smaller class sizes, standardised testing, and publishing of data associated with school performance.
While it is obvious that there is no single solution to improving educational outcomes, the opposition believes that there must also be accountability at the individual school level and that the provision of comparative data is essential to achieve this.
When in government, the federal opposition introduced requirements that schools must report a range of indicators, including professional engagement, key student outcomes, including literacy and numeracy benchmark information, and parent, student and teacher interaction. We believe information about how schools are performing not only helps parents to make informed choices but also creates an
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