Time to ring the school bell: ACT's hidden educational underperformance

The report says bluntly that ACT schools, among the most expensive per head in the Commonwealth, underperform compared with their peers. Not underperforming when compared with South Australian country schools, or outer-suburban schools in Sydney or Melbourne. But definitely not up to the scratch of even ordinary middle-class schools in the posher Australian suburbs.

Normally we Canberra folk are relaxed in our knowledge that, when the national NAPLAN or similar tables are published, ACT student averages will be the best in Australia. But that is only because we are, on average, an unusual and homogenous set of well-off schools, without poorer or disadvantaged schools much "dragging us down". When like school compared with like school, we noticeably underperform compared with our peers.

Indeed, in some areas, the average ACT student is up to six months, in educational terms, behind students of the same age in similar classes elsewhere. This is a fact artfully concealed behind the fact that the ACT is deeply bourgeois, with high-achieving parents who have high involvement in and expectations for their children. The average socio-economic profile of ACT parents, and their average incomes and educational attainments, are higher than anywhere else, and thus ACT educators can smugly say ACT children have, on average, the best results of any educational jurisdiction.

"The government school performance in the ACT report identified that, when comparing ACT public schools with similar schools in other jurisdictions, ACT public schools consistently achieved lower results: state and territory results show that, after taking account of intake and context differences, ACT government schools on average achieve negative results on every measure," the report's findings read.

"For example, in year 5 numeracy mean scores the ACT records the worst result of any jurisdiction. On average, students are performing 20 points lower than comparable students in [another jurisdiction]. Twenty points represents almost 6 months of learning and suggests that at a school level by year 5 students in the ACT are almost 6 months behind students in comparable schools in [another jurisdiction].

"The results are worse at year 9, where for numeracy the deficit is almost 25 mean score points, keeping in mind that selective entry schools have been excluded.

"Students performing in the top bands of performance are also lower than expected in the ACT after taking account of differences in school intakes. For numeracy, the results suggest that on average the proportion of students in the top two bands of year numeracy achievement are 12 percentage points lower that what is achieved in [another jurisdiction], all else equal.

"Numeracy is the area of greatest concern. While results are also significantly lower on all reading performance measures, the numeracy results are markedly below the rest of the country, compared to what would be expected based on the populations schools are serving in the ACT.

"A striking feature is that in numeracy the ACT schools are performing ... at the lower levels of performance for schools of similar ICSEA values.

"ACT schools have higher ICSEA values as a group. This equates to higher mean scores for NAPLAN compared to schools in other states and territories where the tails of performance reduce raw mean scores. The effect is to conceal the real levels of performance in the ACT which is lower than expected (predicted) based on the student population and weaker than schools serving similar populations in other states."

The audit report was, of course, focused on ACT school performance, and even there, government school performance, not the (generally equally unimpressive) performances of ACT private or Catholic systemic schools. It must also be emphasised that the focus of the report was not in evaluating school NAPLAN results as such, but investigating how school principals and teachers were using the information they gained from NAPLAN and others evaluations as feedback in planning and attempting to improve school performance. Not so well, it seems, though people are trying.

But Australians worried about general issues of quality of education, and in how school performance is to be improved, would also find much to ponder beyond the mere pleasure of seeing a smug and complacent system taken down a peg or two.

There was a time – it was more than 40 years ago – when the ACT school system was the best in Australia. It adopted the general NSW Wyndham reforms of the 1960s, which considerably improved the calibre of science and language teaching, and added a year to life in high school.

In the early 1970s, it picked up on a Tasmanian idea of separating out the last two years of secondary school into a colleges system, which provided improved readiness for tertiary study, including into vocational and technical education. Far more, and better than Tasmania, however, it gave considerable autonomy to school principals and individual schools, as well as permitting a wide range of curriculum development. The quality of school architecture and facilities, school staffing ratios and teacher pay was consistently high.

For all intents and purposes, ACT schools were city schools, to be compared with city schools in other jurisdictions, such as in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. They did not have problems of remoteness. They had a far smaller proportion of students who fitted in categories recognised by the Gonski reviews as setting the state for disadvantage: children with disabilities, children who spoke languages other than English in their home, and Aboriginal children. The ACT has been the full Gonski, and, while schools and teachers whinge as much as anywhere, ACT primary and secondary education has never much suffered from serious under-resourcing, poor morale or a want of public will to have and to demand excellence in outcomes.

There are hints that the ACT results might be even worse than reported.

The ACT seems to have a significantly lower rate of participation by year 3, 5 and 9 students in national literacy and numeracy tests, even though it should have a lower proportion of students who ought to "qualify" for exemption from the testing.

It has long been suggested in some jurisdictions that some "prestige" schools are both tactical and strategic in tactfully withholding some of their poorer performing students from the testing process, lest they "drag down" the averages and "make the school look bad". The significant difference between ACT and national average participation rates invites questions about whether rorting, and effective fraud, is taken further in Canberra than elsewhere.

But what ought to invite despair is the apparent indifference from the ACT Education Directorate, which supervises such an inadequate and indifferent system with more resources and public support than any other jurisdiction. Its full formal response to the audit report goes like this:

"The Education Directorate appreciates the efforts of the ACT Auditor‐General and her team in acknowledging and recognising the extensive measures and mechanisms that the directorate has implemented and will continue to implement to make improvements to student educational outcomes in ACT public schools.

"It is important to note that over the past few years, national and international assessments of student achievement in Australia have shown little improvement, and in some areas have declined, despite an overall per student increase in expenditure. The ACT is not immune from this trend.

"Even though we remain a high-achieving system, our key focus is on student gain across years of schooling.

"The Education Directorate is investing in the better use of data by teachers, school leaders and as a system. The ACT Government has recently launched its Future of Education Strategy and has invited the community to comment on how we can further improve our education system overall."

Summed up, this self-satisfied congratulatory message to itself is that nothing much need be done, and that other systems are also at a standstill. ACT authorities see no need to re-evaluate the way they are (failing to) improve the system (or, indeed, are going backwards). Nonetheless, the message continues, the administration continues to care deeply, and will continue to invest more and more money in allowing the level of smugness and failure to be documented. Labor, in particular, makes a fetish of increasing its investment in education. But only, it seems to show that it cares. Nothing has been done since self-government more than 30 years ago to cause anything but the most minor change at the margins.

There is, I am afraid to say, a rather similar attitude, sometimes more stridently demonstrated, by educational authorities elsewhere in discussing the performances of public, private and religious systemic schools in most of the states. As often as not, these attitudes are masked by fairly open hostility to the very idea of performance testing, and mortal fear that the results of performance tests will lead to direct comparisons of school performance, teacher performance, or forms and styles of teaching.

There is legitimate criticism to be made of NAPLAN testing, the reduction of student performance to external measures, and crude methods of comparison. But such criticisms do not undermine the case for continuous critical review of how Australian schools are performing, not least in the face of evidence from international comparisons that our potentially best students are not being extended, that our disadvantaged children are not much being improved, and that our averages are at best, in international terms, below best practice.

Such problems are compounded by the tendency of some politicians to think in slogans, or to fix upon some gimmick, or some technique as the magic bullet for any perceived problems. Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard did actual damage to educational improvement with their policy of giving a computer to every student. A computer can be a useful, if not essential adjunct to education, but neither helps create a modern "21st century" teaching environment, nor provides the best return. There may be more excuse for the 2008 Treasury idea of a massive rushed "investment" in school halls and libraries when the global financial crisis created an economic need to flood the building industry everywhere with lots of money. But though the program did not deserve the label of being a vast failure, as suggested by its critics, it again did not represent the most appropriate or urgent type of spending on educational capital and infrastructure.

Canberra ought to have the nation's model schools, and not only in performance at standard national tests, but in curriculum development, access and connection to other levels of the education system, capacity in fields such as maths and science, languages and social studies. But, as in so many other areas of modern Australian government, teachers and administrators have spent most of the past three decades feeling under siege, feeling that the real struggle is merely to hold on, without the capacity for fundamental re-evaluations, review or reorganisation, or the luxury of time for long term planning and investment. As often as not , its leaders are focused on dealing with the pet theories of ideologues (particularly from America, no model of any idea in education), changing demographic needs, and the vexed, and possibly unsolvable problem of better rewarding teachers for performance and advancing the quality and status of the teaching vocation.

The federation problem – of mixed accountabilities to both state and federal governments – and the difficulties caused by the non-government and government divide – as well as the weakness of COAG and national governance and review mechanisms means that there is little accountability for money spent, and little incentive for fundamental review of how, and why we do teaching, and what we teach. Too many of the reviews, in any event, are political – in that they have been commissioned for the culture wars – or bureaucratic – bland and managerialist products from the usual suspects in the consulting industry.

Essentially, Australian students are being taught much as they were 50 years ago, and are being taught much the same stuff, except, often, less intensively. And in classrooms not much different than 50 years ago, if they are not in fact exactly the same.

It is not as if teachers are not trying to adapt, or that politicians have no interest. But too many are focused only in minor incremental changes, of the type made manifest in the latest rounds of state and territorial budgets, including in the ACT. The general population is better educated than ever, and expects much more of the system. In general, the more parents are involved in the process, the better performance is. Alas, the evidence suggests that only lip service is being paid to the idea, and ideal, of better fitting our young citizens for engagement with our civilisation.

Jack Waterford is a former Canberra Times editor. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com