Canberra Liberals are calling for an independent systemic review of the ACT education system, which they say is failing ACT students. The government disagrees that any such review is needed.
The Liberals’ report, Bringing out the best in every child: An Education strategy for the ACT, prepared by educationalist Dr Karen Macpherson, was published last week (17 June).
The ACT should be the best performing school system in Australia, said Jeremy Hanson, Shadow Minister for Education, but there were significant problems in terms of academic results (low literacy and numeracy); school facilities (overcrowding and ageing infrastructure); bullying; and governance and equity.
The education system was stagnating and due for reform, the report argues, even though the ACT has the highest teacher salaries, the smallest class sizes, and the second highest education funding per student in Australia ($21,299) after the Northern Territory.
“The ACT is lagging behind and is falling behind when it comes to important issues like literacy and numeracy – and in some cases up to 16 months falling behind other jurisdictions in Australia,” Mr Hanson said.
- The ACT has underperformed on NAPLAN (national standardised Literacy and Numeracy) assessments since 2012, and has a downward trajectory compared to other regions of similar socio-economic advantage.
- ACT government schools on average achieved negative results on every measure, performing below similar schools in other jurisdictions (Auditor-General, 2017).
- By Year 5, students in the ACT were almost six months behind students in comparable schools in numeracy, markedly below the rest of the country (Victoria University, 2017).
- Year 7 and 9 students’ writing and numeracy are below equivalent mean results from statistically similar schools (ANU, 2018).
- The ACT is below average for comparably high Australian socio-economic advantage quartile groups on Literacy, Maths, and Science (PISA – Programme for International Student Assessment, 2018). (However, last year’s PISA test showed ACT students performing better than average in reading, science, and maths.)
- ACT mean Maths and Science scores are well below means used for assessing socio-economic advantage in both Year 4 and 8 (TIMSS – Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, 2019).
- The ACT Education Directorate’s own Annual Report 2019–20 stated that only one of seven key performance indicators was met.
- “The ACT is the worst performer,” according to the Grattan Institute (2018). “On a life-for-life basis, its students make two to three months’ less progress than the national average in both primary and secondary school.”
The Canberra Liberals believe these trends can be reversed by more focus on the basics of literacy and numeracy. They point to the UK, which recently overhauled its educational system to focus on the three R’s. A decade ago, Britain was 16 places behind Australia; now, it is well ahead.
Mr Hanson believed the ACT needed a comprehensive review, similar to that conducted by David Gonski in 2018, to understand why the ACT was falling behind on literacy and numeracy.
“If you’re a young child and you miss out on those fundamental building blocks of literacy and numeracy, you don’t get a chance to catch up on that; you’re lost in the education system forever,” he said.
Yvette Berry, Minister for Education and Youth Affairs, denied that there was any problem, and disagreed that an independent review would be useful; one had been conducted in 2018.
“I would think the last thing our schools want to be going through is yet another review. … Every five years, individual schools go through an independent assessment themselves to see what they’re doing really well and to find out areas where they need improvement.”
Mr Hanson, however, argued that the education system must be looked at as a system, not school by school. “At the moment, there are external reviews of individual schools, but that’s not painting the broad picture that we need to see.”
Ms Berry also disagreed that ACT children were between two months and a year behind children in other parts of Australia.
Both she and the Australian Education Union ACT Branch (AEU ACT), an independent non-partisan body, said that NAPLAN, PISA, and TIMSS did not tell the whole story of a child’s education.
“They are useful for point-in-time data … but these are only a point-in-time test,” Ms Berry said. “That needs to be taken into account when assessing whether or not a child’s education is fulsome or it needs to be improved.”
According to the report, the government’s standard response is to assert that NAPLAN testing is narrowly focused, seriously flawed, stressful and unnecessary, inaccurate, or not useful. “This ‘shooting the messenger’ strategy is aimed at deflecting attention from the ongoing underperformance of the ACT.”
The report states that the ACT compares its NAPLAN ranking to other states and territories broadly, rather than to urban areas in other states and territories with high socio-economic advantage.
“Relying on the ACT’s comparative ‘average’ rank in national and international testing hides the significant inequity in the ACT’s education system,” University of Canberra researchers wrote (2015).
