YEARS 9-12 EDUCATION IN TASMANIA: A RESPONSE TO THE ACER REVIEW

In July 2016 the Tasmanian Government commissioned the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) ‘to undertake an independent review of Years 9 to 12 concerning the following issues:

• student and workforce data • curriculum policy and provision (including vocational education and training - VET) • design and delivery for Years 9 to 12 (which includes the three Tasmanian education sectors: the Tasmanian Catholic Education Office (TCEO), Independent Schools Tasmania (IST) and the Department of Education (DoE)).’ [19]1

The Report was released in early March 2017, and soon thereafter was tabled in the Parliament by the Minister for Education, the Hon. Jeremy Rockliff. It can be downloaded from the Department of Education web site here.

While we find things of great importance to commend in the Report, it is nonetheless a curious and disappointing document. It perpetuates muddles about the nature of year 12 attainment; does not use the most reliable performance data; fails to consider readily available information which would have shown important assumptions that the Review adopts are dubious; does not draw obvious inferences from the information it does provide – some of it very valuable new information; suggests policy changes which would be a disaster for many Tasmanian young people; fails to provide the national context for some significant aspects of the Tasmanian Yrs 9-12 education system to which it refers; and in all adopts a conservative, inward looking and defensive approach to senior secondary – and university - education in Tasmania, which is strikingly at odds with the thinking which is needed to identify the progressive change required. Nor, indeed, does the Review identify and give credit to the teachers and principals who are leading change.

We will consider the Report under the following headings which we believe get to the heart of the problems with its analysis:

1. The concept of Year 12 completion2. Statistics about Year 12 completions: do we have a problem?3. Year 12 completion and university entry4. What the Review thinks we learn from the data they present on educational

performance5. Public accountability and our use of education statistics6. Finding a basis to fairly evaluate the performance of Tasmania’s senior secondary

system7. Student aspirations8. Staffing9. Curriculum10. VET and VEL11. The TCE12. The structure of senior secondary schooling

1 Numbers in square brackets refer to that page of the Review. Text in square brackets is added by the authors.

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1. The concept of Year 12 completion

The Review gets off to a bad start, stating

The major statistic for this Review is the measure of Year 12 completion. [34]

This leads the Review into a maze of conceptual confusion we will encounter throughout our discussion. This muddle could easily have been avoided if, from the outset, the Review had used the definitions employed by MySchool to distinguish between completing senior secondary school and attaining a senior secondary certificate. The use of these MySchool definitions would have achieved a clear distinction between these two key statistics, as follows:

Completed senior secondary school: the number of students who left school having completed the equivalent of two or more years post Year 10 studies (not necessarily full-time nor consecutive) who are eligible for a statement of results, or a record of achievements.Senior secondary certificate awarded: the number of students who left school having fulfilled the requirements for a senior secondary certificate issued by a Board of Studies in the relevant state or territory.2

And indeed, we note in passing, the Review itself acknowledges the need for this distinction, but much later, stating

Perhaps the most important and misunderstood concept is ‘completion of Year 12’. This concept can sometimes also be conflated with ‘staying on’ and ‘finishing school’. [164]

For completeness of its key statistics the Review might have added, using its measure of equivalence [45],

Year 12 equivalent: the number of students who left school, or a VET provider, having fulfilled the requirements of a certificate III (or higher).3

These are the statistics we need to know to assess the performance of our post-compulsory education and training system: how many students continued their education until they had 2 Following the abolition of the Tasmanian Qualifications Authority in 2015, Tasmania is the only jurisdiction which does not have a Board of Studies overseeing senior secondary education. In Tasmania, the Office of Tasmanian Standards, Assessment and Certification has this function.3 The Review notes we should look not just at Year 12 completion, but also equivalent vocational education and training, and says that in accordance with the National Partnership on Youth Attainment and Transitions, it is ‘established that Certificate III should be considered the equivalent to Year 12 completion’. [45] That is the statistic which is reported in the three surveys the Review uses to provide ‘Year 12 completion’ data. For the sake of this discussion we accept this equivalence – despite the document referenced by the Review (the National Partnership on Youth Attainment and Transitions) specifying Certificate II (not III) or above, with the COAG agreement from which this Agreement derives stating that this will move upwards to Certificate III or above by 2020, and noting recent reputable commentators questioning whether either such qualification can be taken as equivalent to a Year 12 certificate. See especially Patrick Lim and Tom Karmel The Vocational Equivalent to Year 12 http://www.centralrangesllen.org.au/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/LSAY_Vocational_Equivalent_Yr12.pdf

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reached the end of year 12 (versus how many dropped out before, including part-way through Year 12); and how many gained a Year 12 level qualification, either the senior secondary certificate, or (at least) a certificate III.

However, the Review decided to use the ambiguous notion of ‘Year 12 completion’ as its major statistic. It then immediately compounded the muddle about what this might be taken to mean by giving credence to concerns expressed in the consultations about the ‘inconsistency’ of ‘statistics that had been reported about education in public discussion of Tasmania’s rate of Year 12 attainment’, claiming

In some cases, it is a problem of using the Tasmanian Certificate of Education (TCE) as the sole measure of Year 12 completion, ignoring alternative certificates, such as the Qualifications Certificate (QC) and the Tasmanian Certificate of Educational Achievement (TCEA). [34]

But as is clear from the web site of the Tasmanian senior secondary authority, the Office of Tasmanian Assessment, Standards and Certification (TASC), the Qualifications Certificate is not a Year 12 qualification:

The Qualifications Certificate (QC) is issued by TASC. It is available to all Tasmanians who have gained one or more post-compulsory qualifications accredited or recognized by TASC.

The Qualifications Certificate shows all qualifications with awards in TASC accredited senior secondary courses, qualifications (and awards if applicable) in TASC recognized courses, and Vocational Education and Training (VET) qualifications and units of competency that a learner has achieved.

Clearly, the Qualifications Certificate is a record of achievements not a qualification. It bears the same relation to a qualification – the TCE say, or a VET Certificate – as your bank statement bears to the balance in your account.

As to the Tasmanian Certificate of Educational Achievement, while this is an important qualification for those who overcome the obstacles to learning they need to have encountered to qualify for its award, the TASC makes clear these are few in number:

The Tasmanian Certificate of Educational Achievement (TCEA) is a quality assured, centrally issued certificate that describes achievement through narrative. Designed for the small number of students whose learning and achievement is often not adequately recognized by standardized forms of certification, it will provide a fairer and more just account of their senior secondary learning success. [emphasis added]

It is surprising that the Review should conflate these three different certificates. Further this added confusion prevented their finding a way out of the muddle created by the puzzling decision to use ‘completing Year 12’ as their key statistic. But for this confusion of certificates, the Review could have simply said that ‘completing Year 12’ means gaining the TCE (or its VET equivalent), save for the students for whom this is not possible, but these are so few in number as not to affect any conclusion that might be drawn from taking the

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number of TCEs awarded in any one year as the measure of senior secondary certificate completions for public accountability purposes. Especially since the Review had previously stated, in contradiction to the claim just quoted (i.e. that completing Year 12 in Tasmania should not be equated with gaining the TCE),

no other jurisdiction has a statement about completion that does not include the award of the senior secondary certificate. [21, emphases added]

At this point the reader is at a loss to say what the Review proposes as its ‘major statistic’, the measure of Year 12 completion in Tasmania. The Review ‘resolves’ this issue in a wholly unsatisfactory way, simply moving on to cite other sources all of which (other than data from the TASC) are based on the national census or surveys, which essentially solve the problem of what to count as Year 12 completion by asking respondents whether they think they have completed Year 12. Clearly, their answers must be treated with great caution.

2. Statistics about Year 12 completions: do we have a problem?

First the Review turns to the Mitchell Institute, which reported that, as at 2015, 74% of Australian young people had attained a Year 12 or equivalent certificate by age 19, and that for Tasmania the figure was 60%. [Educational Opportunity in Australia 2015, p. 42] The source of this data is the ABS Census of Population and Housing. This data will be as reliable as the populations’ understanding of what counts as attaining Year 12. If we trust this data it tells us that Tasmania is positioned midway between WA and the Northern Territory. That would seem to be a problem, but perhaps, as the Mitchell Institute suggests, this should be seen as, at least in part, a consequence of our relative poverty and lack of a major capital city, rather than a reflection on our senior secondary system.

Next the Report turns to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Survey of Education and Work (SEW), which gathers data on Year 12 or equivalent completion, in all jurisdictions, by asking people surveyed whether they completed Year 12, or a Certificate III or above. This puts Tasmania’s Year 12 or equivalent completion rate for 20-24 year olds at 77.1% for 2016, compared to the national figure of 89.2%.4 Again, this would seem to be a problem, but from this the Review draws the conclusion that ‘there are indications that the attainment of a Year 12 or equivalent certificate is increasing,’ and leaves the matter there. [45]

However, a cursory inspection of the data [Table 4 of the Report, p.45] suggests other conclusions are much better supported.

First, the data for Tasmania from this source is extraordinary volatile. In 2012 it was 68.4% - the lowest from 2007 to 2016. In 2013 it jumps to 81.2%, before falling back to 70.2% in 2014. The differences here are of the order of 900 persons or so, or about half of the TCE graduates from all of the colleges put together. Looking at the longer trend the figures are more stable, but do not suggest an improving trend we should be satisfied with: the figure

4 Note that the years here – 2016, for example - refer to the year of the survey not the year in which the respondents gained the qualifications they claim to hold.

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for 2016 (77.1%) is just 4% above 2007, while the whole of Australia has improved 7% in the same time - from 82.3% to 89.2%. So if this data is to be trusted, we are both improving relative to ourselves, and falling further behind Australia as a whole. It is incredibly inward looking to notice the former, but not the latter. And from the volatility of this data it would appear to be just luck that the data suggest the Tasmanian Year 12 completion rate is improving at all – if the series had ended at 2015 rather than 2016 and we are to judge performance by the difference between individual years starting from 2007, we would have to say we had gone backwards. At 68.5%, 2015 is the lowest year in the series with the exception of 2012 (68.4%), well below 2007 at 73.1%. Clearly, even if we are satisfied with being self-referential by not looking at the rest of Australia, we need to look at the overall trend in the data rather than individual years - and for Tasmania, that is fundamentally flat with 2013 an outlier.

Finally, the Review uses the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) which gathered data from a sample of students from each jurisdiction, who had turned 15 in 2009. LSAY reported that by 2015, 82% of the Tasmanian sample had attained a Year 12 certificate or a VET Certificate III, compared to 91% in NSW and up to 98% in Queensland. Again, this too would seem to be a problem, but the Review does not draw this conclusion. Rather they claim the data shows that while Tasmanian students start behind, they catch up:

By 2012, 51 per cent of Tasmanian participants had obtained a Year 12 certificate or VET Certificate III; in all other jurisdictions that figure was more than 73 per cent. The gap between Tasmania and the other jurisdictions closed by 2014. [46]

How do they reach a conclusion so at odds with what the data presented in their Figure 8 [46] reveals (as reproduced below)? First, they claim that

In Tasmania, the majority of these [15 year old] students were in Year 9, and would have reached Year 12 later than most other participants. [46]

But this is false, as the graph itself suggests. In all jurisdictions apart from Queensland and Western Australia, very few students in the cohort completed Year 12 by 2011, with the majority of completions in 2012, including in Tasmania. Looking carefully at the LSAY data itself explains why Tasmania is not out of step with most other jurisdictions here – though not performing up to their level:

Table 1: Year level of students in 2009 LSAY cohortStudents’ year level in 2009 NSW VIC QLD SA WA TAS NT ACTYear 9 or below 11.3% 20.2% 1.4% 5.9% 2.0% 32.7% 5.4% 13.6%Year 10 83.6% 77.7% 50.2% 84.6% 44.9% 67.2% 84.0% 85.3%Year 11 5.0% 2.0% 48.2% 9.5% 52.9% 0.1% 10.5% 1.0%Year 12 0.2% 0.1% 0.2% 0.1%

Extracted from LSAY QuickStats Y09 – Education Certainly more Tasmanian than other students in the LSAY 09 cohort were in Year 9 in 2009, but just 32.7%, not a majority as the Review claims, and only about 10% more than Victoria

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(20.2%), 20% more than the ACT (13.6%) and NSW (11.3%), and so on. So the age of our students for their year level is, at best, only a part of the explanation of the 20-30% gap in Year 12 attainment by 2012 shown in the graph, and likewise the 10-20% gap that remains in 2013.

Having misread the data in asserting that a majority of Tasmanian students ‘start behind’, the Review then falls into the trap of focusing solely on the increase in their rate of attainment over time, claiming that this shows Tasmania ‘closed the gap’.

But again, this is not the obvious conclusion that should be drawn from the data. Rather, it shows that many fewer of this cohort of young Tasmanians entered adulthood with a qualification than in the next jurisdiction, by a margin of over 20%, and despite continuing to study (presumably mostly after leaving school, and thus at their own expense) they never attain the level of qualifications enjoyed by their peers, even in the Northern Territory. Indeed, looking at the data presented in Figure 8 of the Review Report [46], Tasmania is way out of line with the rest of Australia, and far from having ‘closed the gap’, as claimed by the Review. As the reader will see for themselves.

The upshot of all this is surely that asking people whether they have completed Year 12 or some equivalent does not yield data that provides any comfort to Tasmania in relation to the performance of its senior secondary system, quite apart from doubts about whether the data is sufficiently robust to be a basis for sound policy.5 But is there an alternative?

5 We do not discuss the even more perplexing claim of the Review that ‘[t]he statistics that best indicate completion of Year 12… [are] the Year 7–12 apparent retention rate and the Year 11–12 direct retention rate’ [24] (which obviously conflates ‘completing Year 12’ with ‘staying on’). While it is pleasing, as the Review observes, that these retention rates ‘are increasing, and the gap between Tasmania and other jurisdictions is decreasing’ they are no more a measure of Year 12 completion than the number of acres ploughed by a farmer, the weight of seed sown and fertilizer applied, is a measure of the crop that is harvested. To put it more formally, retention to Year 12 is a necessary

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It is surprising that the Review did not consider the most obvious source of authoritative data on the educational performance of the different jurisdictions – the Productivity Commission‘s annual Report on Government Services (ROGS). These annual public reports contain a wealth of data (covering all schooling systems, not just government schools) provided by the relevant jurisdictional departments and instrumentalities, as well as insightful commentary on relevant issues with the data - including changes to jurisdictions’ reporting protocols that make year to year comparisons problematic in some instances, and caveats around comparing one jurisdiction with another on various measures.

Below is an excerpt from the data table on Year12 certificate (or equivalent) completion from the 2016 ROGS. The full table gives data from 2010, along with notes to aid interpretation and avoid misconceptions – such as noting the introduction of the new TCE in Tasmania in 2009, which changed the requirement for the award of the TCE from the completion of at least one senior secondary course, to the current requirements (which are more in line with those of other jurisdictions), causing a dramatic decline in Tasmania’s reported Year 12 completion rate from 58% in 2008 to just 39% in 2009. The notes also tell us that in 2011 South Australia’s approach to reporting completion went the other way, from that year including in their report not only students who attain the SACE but also students who complete one full year Stage 2 (Year 12 level) SACE course – which caused their Year 12 completion rate to increase from 66% to 77%. We also learn that WA changed the school starting age in 2002 which led to the 2014 Year12 class being about half its normal size, making their Year 12 completion rate (calculated against the age cohort as for all jurisdictions) abnormally low for that year.

Thus we know that Tasmania cannot be compared with SA or WA for Year 12 certificates or equivalent in 2014, and there may be other reasons why a direct comparison with other jurisdictions would need to be qualified in some way. But nonetheless, we clearly need to take notice of the comparison and ask the obvious questions:

1. Why is Tasmania’s rate of Year 12 or equivalent certificates so low, especially for low SES students where there is a 25% gap to the Australian average, a gap which narrows to 10% for high SES students - although our high SES students are still below the Australian average for low SES students?

2. And why is the gap between the attainment of low and high SES students in Tasmania (24%) more than twice that of any of the other jurisdictions (NT put to one side: they have no high SES students in this data)? The figure for Australia as a whole is just 9%.

It would have been enormously helpful to have had the Review team’s insights into this data.

condition of completing Year 12, but certainly not a sufficient condition, still less an equivalent to it, and certainly no measure that should be taken seriously as a goal of a school or system on which an assessment of its performance might usefully be based. This confusion of inputs and outputs completely undermines this section of the Report.

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Table 2: Completion rates, Year 12, by socioeconomic status and sex, all schools (per cent)

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2014 NSW Vic Qld WA SA Tas ACT NT Aust

Low socioeconomic status deciles            

Male students 63 74 59 43 72 38 np 16 62

Female students 76 79 71 49 88 47 np 21 73

All students 69 76 65 46 79 42 np 18 67Medium socioeconomic status deciles                  

Male students 67 79 67 48 76 48 np 42 68

Female students 76 86 76 52 89 63 np 61 77

All students 71 82 71 49 82 55 np 51 72

High socioeconomic status deciles                  

Male students 77 84 69 49 87 60 84 np 74

Female students 81 88 75 48 93 72 89 np 78

All students 79 86 72 49 90 66 86 np 76

Total                  

Male students 68 80 65 47 77 45 84 35 68

Female students 77 85 74 50 89 56 87 47 76

    All students   73 82 70 48 83 50 85 40 72Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services 2016, Volume b Chapter 4 attachment xlsxExcerpted from Table 4A.124 http://www.pc.gov.au/research/ongoing/report-on-government-services/2016/childcare-education-and-training/school-education

We can only guess that the Review thinks self-reporting by survey participants is more reliable than the official statistics provided to the Australian Government Department of Education and Training (DET - the source of this ROGS data) by the relevant state and territory authorities. Their reasons for this surprising preference are not explained. But in rejecting the use of the attainment data provided by the Tasmanian authority, (which would be reported to DET) they say

At present it is not possible to precisely enumerate all 19 year olds who have met the standard of Year 12 completion or equivalent. Tasmanian Assessment, Standards and Certification (TASC) reports on the number of TCEs and VET certificates awarded each year and the percentage of young people eligible to attain a certificate. [45]

The Review does not make it clear why it is not possible to ‘enumerate all 19 year olds who have met the standard of Year 12 completion or equivalent’. But the sentence following (quoted above) provides a clue, so far as Tasmania is concerned. First, it may be that not all VET providers accurately report all certificates awarded to the TASC; second, since VET achievements can be counted towards the TCE, a student might include a VET certificate among their studies for the TCE, in which case summing the TCE and the VET certificates would be double counting, which would inflate the statistic for completion of the Year 12 certificate or equivalent for Tasmania.

Since it is a legislative requirement for Registered Training Providers (RTOs) operating in Tasmania to provide the TASC with a record of qualifications awarded, it is unlikely that under-reporting is a major issue. Certainly if the Review knew this to be the case that should have been highlighted in their Report, not least so that the relevant authorities could

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respond accordingly, to achieve greater compliance and more accurate reporting. And as to the second, we could simply consider both the number of TCEs and VET certificates awarded while keeping in mind the double counting issue – which is in fact what the Review does, reporting that of the Year 10 cohort from 2013, 51% had achieved the TCE and 24% had attained a VET certificate (at any level) by 2015, and that this was a substantial improvement over previous years – for the 2009 Year 10 cohort the figures were 39% and 15%, respectively. [Table 10, p. 55 &Table 11, p.56]

In relation to this TCE data the Review comments

These data exclude part-time students… [so it] is probable that the statistics reported … are lower than the actual statistics… but it is not possible to determine from the available data the magnitude of the differences. [54]

But this last claim is simply not true, at least so far as the TCE is concerned. Mindful of the need to consider the impact of part-time/extended study on completion, we found information on part-time TCE completions for students studying at the colleges, which shows that part-time study added no more than 5% to the total, even over four years.6 This information was provided to the Review in Attachment 4 to our submission, but was apparently overlooked by the authors of the Review.

3. Year 12 completion and university entry

This is the most disappointing part of the Review. In its later summary of the data presented on Tasmanian education, the Review concludes

The data reviewed here indicate that Tasmanian education is doing well by comparison with other States and Territories of Australia. [63]

So far as this relates to the preparation of students for university study, this judgment relies on the claim that

Among those who do remain in school and receive a TCE, there is little difference between Tasmania and other jurisdictions in the award of an ATAR. [63]

The support for this judgment, however, relies on mismatched – and indeed misleading – statistics. The important statistic in relation to university participation, which is the sole purpose of receiving an ATAR, is what percentage of the age cohort received an ATAR and how this compares to other jurisdictions, not what percentage of those who ‘do remain at school and receive a TCE’ achieve an ATAR. Should just one student remain at school and receive a TCE, and also an ATAR, the statistic the Review uses to judge the success of Tasmania’s senior secondary system in relation to university entry would be 100%. But the reality would be a disaster for Tasmania.

6 According to data provided to the Parliament by the DoE in answer to QoN no 26 of 2014, and QoN No. 69 of 2016, asked by the Hon Ruth Forrest.

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Apart from this section on university entry, the whole of the Review’s discussion of senior secondary education, every figure and table, uses the whole of the relevant population - age cohort or year level, for example - as the base for calculating performance statistics, in particular ‘Year12 completion’, in accordance with the accepted practice for achieving comparability between jurisdictions. But when it comes to the ATAR, the Review shifts the base of the percentage to just students achieving the TCE - a most surprising mismatching of statistics which could easily mislead the reader into thinking, as the Review indeed concludes, that Tasmania is keeping company with other jurisdictions in relation to young people moving from school to university. Whereas the reality is just the opposite.

We know from TASC rates of attainment data that while 3,385 persons or 50.4% of the age cohort received a TCE in 2015, just 2,202 persons or 32.8% received an ATAR. For students who attended a government school in Year 10 and studied full time until Year 12 (direct continuation – we know part-time study will add at most 5% as explained above) the figures are 1,764 or 41.8% for the TCE, and 920 or 21.8% for an ATAR.

How does that compare to other jurisdictions? As it happens the Review has given us the data we need to provide this comparison, although they failed to do the arithmetic themselves.

Table 3: Year 12 certificates and ATARs as a percentage of the Year 12 cohort

NSW Vic QLD SA WA Tas NT ACT Aust15–19 year olds 468,884 360,348 309,200 104,365 160,364 33,451 16,029 23,021 1,475,843Yr12 cohort* 93,777 72,070 61,840 20,873 32,073 6,690 3,206 4,604 295,169 Year 12 certificates 65,279 62,717 47,202 14,668 22,630 3,385 1,338 4,523 221,742 Yr 12 certificate as % of Year 12 cohort 70% 87% 76% 70% 71% 51% 42% 98% 75%ATARs 55,736 44,255 25,764 11,960 12,500 2,202 910 2,759 156,086 ATARs as a % of Year 12 cohort 59% 61% 42% 57% 39% 33% 28% 60% 53%ATARs as a % of Yr12 certificates 85% 71% 55% 82% 55% 65% 68% 61% 70%

*Year 12 cohort calculated as one fifth of 15-19 year olds, in accordance with COAG protocol.Population data from http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/3101.0Jun 2015?OpenDocumentYear 12 certificates and ATAR data (italicized for ease of reference) from Yr 9-12 Review, Figure 14, p. 59

The data in the bottom line of the table is what the Review uses to discuss the success of the Tasmanian education system in relation to students achieving an ATAR. It looks good, placing Tasmania above QLD and WA, and not far below Vic and Australia as whole. But looking at other jurisdictions, things start to look odd. NT is above Tasmania, and the ACT

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below. How could it be that the NT is doing a better job than Tasmania in preparing young people for university, and the ACT worse? The rat smelled is outed when we realize the base of the statistic is shifted from all young people to just those who attain their Year 12 certificate. In the ACT, almost all young people attain their Year 12 certificate, but not all want to go to university – so it looks bad if we use the recipients of Year 12 certificates as the base for the ‘percentage getting the ATAR’ statistic. Conversely, in the NT, many fewer students attain their Year 12 certificate, and most of these want to go to university.

If we go back to using the relevant age cohort – bolded in the table - then things look rather different. Now Tasmania is positioned midway between WA and NT, at the bottom. At 33% of the Year 12 age cohort, Tasmania is a full 20% below Australia as a whole and lagging NSW, Vic, SA and the ACT by 25% and more. Clearly, and contrary to the Review’s claim, Tasmanian education is not ‘doing well by comparison with other States and Territories’ on the measure of successful transition from school to university.

This is an important point that is worth dwelling upon before we proceed. In our experience, a common response to attempts to benchmark the performance of Tasmanian senior secondary education against other states and territories is the claim that it is not possible to compare the rate of Year 12 completion across jurisdictions because of differences in the requirements and standards of the different certificates. No such problems exist with the ATAR – there is agreement across all jurisdictions that all ATARs are equal. So it is possible to directly compare senior secondary education in Tasmania with all other jurisdictions on the measure of the proportion of the age cohort that receives an ATAR. Here the news is not at all good and we must face this problem directly. A young person in the ACT and Victoria has almost twice the chance of gaining an ATAR than a young person in Tasmania. South Australia, a state demographically much more like Tasmania, is not far behind the leaders.

The rest of the Review’s discussion of the transition to university is vitiated by the same kind of mistake in the choice of the base for the statistics used. It might be true that Tasmania is right up with the top performers in the number of ATAR recipients who apply for university. [Figure 15, p.60] But once again, if only one Tasmanian student received an ATAR, and they applied for university, we would be unbeatable. Likewise for the good news in Figure 16, [61] showing that Tasmanian students who received their Year 12 certificate were almost as likely to have applied for university as those in NSW and VIC – with poor old ACT once more beaten by the NT on this measure. The good news continues with the percentage of Year 12 applicants who received an offer of a university place, with Tasmania now the top performer. But again, if only one student had applied, we can be sure they would have received an offer and our 98% score would have been a perfect 100%. As to the final figure [63] showing the percentage of Year 12 applicants who accepted an offer for a university place, this seems to be more a fact about extraneous matters such as the attractiveness of the course on offer than a fact about their preparation for the course, and we make no comment on it.Before we leave this issue, note that it might be argued that the age cohort is not the right population to consider for university entrance, since many young people in Tasmania are not interested in university, at least not in comparison with the ACT or even South Australia. But this would be making the mistake of taking the views of the Tasmanian population as a natural fact, like our location in the roaring forties, rather than the outcome of the population’s experiences of education and their understanding of the value of higher

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education. In short, if our wider community does not value university education as much as people do elsewhere, it is not their problem but ours, the educational community’s.

Happily, however, the view that young people do not value university education is not well supported by the evidence the Review presents, which shows that 40% of Year 10s plan to go to university after school, about the same proportion as plan to get a job, an apprenticeship, go to TAFE and ‘don’t know’ put together. [Table 37, p.74] Sadly, only the relatively few of them qualifying for an ATAR will be able to fulfill this aspiration directly.

4. What the Review thinks we learn from the data they present on educational performance.

What does all this data tell us (and the Review’s discussion of Tasmania’s results in Year 9 NAPLAN, PISA and TIMMS, which we have not summarized)?

Here is the Review’s conclusion which we quote at length:

The data reviewed here indicate that Tasmanian education is doing well by comparison with other States and Territories of Australia…. Overall there is little difference between student achievement in Tasmania and student achievement in other jurisdictions of Australia at Year 9.

‘Completion’ of schooling and its related measures, including university entry, are not as easy to understand in the Tasmanian context. The data do show lower apparent retention rates and lower rates of senior secondary school certificate awards, but this is in the absence of an agreed definition of an alternative to Year 12 completion. Compared to other jurisdictions, Tasmanian students more frequently leave secondary schools and continue their studies with a VET provider; by age 25, there is much less difference in rates of completing Year 12 or an equivalent certificate. Among those who do remain at school and receive a TCE, there is little difference between Tasmania and other jurisdictions in the award of an ATAR, university applications, university offers and student acceptances of those offers.[63]

This is a very valuable and informative summary, albeit muddied by the definitional muddles about ‘Year 12 completion’ once more, and the strange and unexplained assertion that ‘‘Completion’ of schooling and its related measures, including university entry, are not as easy to understand in the Tasmanian context.’7. Putting this aside, the summary tells us in plain terms that at least up until Year 9, schools in Tasmania are performing as well as those in other jurisdictions. After that, however, inter-jurisdictional equity falls away with the

7 It is not at all clear what the Review means here by ‘an agreed definition of an alternative to Year 12 completion’. Presumably something more than a certificate Ill, which the Review identifies as the nationally agreed equivalent. They do recommend later that Tasmania defines a ‘local equivalent of Year 12, the majority of which is done through a VET pathway’ [181] apparently failing to recognize here that the TCE already accommodates such students, provided they fulfill the requirements that have been determined in accordance with the standards which all the paths that lead to the TCE must meet. And of course if we reduce these standards to define some new ‘Tasmanian alternative’ we would have to count the same thing in the other jurisdictions to gain an accurate comparative assessment of Tasmania’s performance – and perhaps then the attainment gap might narrow, stay the same or widen. We suspect what is at play here is nostalgia for the ‘old TCE’ which was awarded prior to 2009.

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review acknowledging Tasmania’s ‘lower apparent retention rates and lower rates of senior school secondary certificate awards’. Consequently, and by comparison, our senior secondary system does not equitably support our young people’s completing a senior secondary certificate, access to university education or the attainment of a vocational qualification, for which – at their own expense - they proceed to TAFE or a private VET provider in greater numbers than in other states, ‘closing the gap’ but never ‘catching up’.

What percentage of Tasmanian students, most relevantly, what percentage of the age cohort, do not gain a qualification from school - the TCE or what the Review takes as the nationally agreed equivalent, a Certificate III or above? And how does this compare to other states and territories? These are obviously the key questions for assessing whether our senior secondary system is meeting the needs of our young people, questions to which the Review provides no clear answers. Accordingly, the Review’s judgement that ‘Tasmanian education is doing well compared to other states and territories’ must be qualified as relating only to schooling up until Year 9, or Year 10 at the latest.

But perhaps the answer, if it was provided, would not be accepted as informative anyway. Certainly, some argue that Tasmania cannot be compared to the other states, in that we are more like a region of the big states in not having a dominant large capital city. But if we accept this claim, how are we to assess the performance of our senior secondary system?

5. Public accountability and our use of education statistics

Before we take up this fundamental question we need to respond to the Review’s concern about public availability and discussion of education statistics.

The Review directs specific criticism at us, claiming that we have used ‘mismatched statistics’ in our submission to the Review which ‘contributed to confusion in the public mind’. [34] They have also reported concerns expressed to the Review – we suspect with us in mind once more – about the ‘inconsistency of statistics that have been reported about education in Tasmania’, in the work of ‘external commentators who use publicly available information to support their views’. [34]

The Review does not give any example of this supposed ‘inconsistency’, nor elucidate its use of the term ‘external’, nor justify the pejorative claim that that such commentators ‘use publicly available information to support their views’ rather than reach conclusions based on the publicly available information. To use data to support one’s view, as opposed to basing one’s view on the data, implies that you have cherry picked the data to find information which supports the position you have taken on other grounds. If that accusation was aimed at us we completely reject it, and ask what evidence we – or whoever the Review had in mind – have ignored in supposedly selecting our facts to suit our conclusion.

This theme continues later, where the Review opines that there is an ‘overabundance of statistics based on the [DoE] data, made available to the public, resulting in conflicting reports of the status of education in Tasmania’. And that this arises because ‘some of the publicly released data are more appropriate for internal planning... and not for public consumption.’ [163] They continue that ‘many of the inconsistencies arise from the misuse

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of official statistics, particularly in how data can be linked. In one example, results for NAPLAN have been linked to TCE attainment.’[164]

This last criticism we find particularly strange given the Review’s unfortunate proposal to make a certain level of performance in NAPLAN a condition of the award of the TCE, but we do strongly agree with the Review’s final statement in this section that ‘Professional learning for school principals about how to apply evidence to school improvement strategies may be beneficial’. [164] For while it may now be true, as the Review claims, that in some respects ‘Tasmanian education has a great supply of data’ [163] this is a very recent development, and it is clear that educational leaders are not practiced in using data to drive continuous improvement in their areas of responsibility – as evidenced by the fact that a major error in the colleges’ VET data on MySchool went unnoticed for some years, and indeed, was not detected until we used this data in a letter to the Hobart daily, The Mercury.

And of course we strenuously reject the claim that in comparing NAPLAN performance with rates of Year 12 certificate attainment we are guilty of mismatching statistics. We have simply compared two different educational outcomes for the same cohort of students – their rate of Year 12 certificate attainment and their Yr 9 NAPLAN achievement – in order to make the point that in other jurisdictions (and in schools fairly and reasonably comparable to Tasmanian schools) almost all students (and in some cases more) who achieve above the national minimum standard for NAPLAN at Year 9 gain their Year 12 certificate, while in Tasmania there is a gap between the two of the order of 20%8 (across all schooling systems, with a much greater gap for the public system alone). This is no more mismatching of statistics than your car’s dashboard reporting current fuel consumption as well as average fuel consumption, and the authors of the Review must have a dim view of the Tasmanian public’s mind if they think reporting two different facts about the same cohort of students is beyond our comprehension.

Now let us put the issue of public performance reporting, and the statistical base which is needed to support it, in a wider national context by noting that one of the eight areas of action to which all governments committed pursuant to the Melbourne Declaration was ‘strengthening accountability and transparency’ of schooling, which includes provision of information which the public can use to assess the performance of a school or system of schooling, exemplified by the MySchool web site.

Tasmania is a late-comer to this table – although we are advised that in times past the State was a leader in this field. When we first took an interest in Tasmanian education very little information was available to the public, or indeed to school leaders. As late as 2014 principals of high schools that ended at Year 10 did not have information on the Year 12 outcomes of their exiting students. Such data was first placed on the public record by the Government in answer to a question asked in the Legislative Council, and since 2015 is

8 For 2016 in Tasmania, these statistics are 76% for Yr 9 NAPLAN (for the percentage of students achieving above the national minimum standard in Reading and Numeracy, averaged – taken from the National NAPLAN Report for 2016) and 56.4% for TCE attainment (from TASC at http://www.tqa.tas.gov.au/4DCGI/_WWW_doc/1344048/RND01/TCE_rates_of_attainment_April_2017.pdf), leaving a gap of 19.6% between the two measures despite the 6% improvement in the latter, because the former has also improved at almost the same rate.

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provided by the TASC via the direct continuation data. No doubt principals and their school communities have found it illuminating, useful and action guiding. And perhaps surprising – as did one recently retired principal who, in conversation with us, was deeply shocked to discover for the first time after a long and highly regarded career as an educator, that fewer than half of the bright, engaged students leaving their school in Year 10, to continue their senior secondary studies at the nearby local college, achieved their TCE.

While we do not doubt the commitment of the leadership of the DoE to fulfill the State Government’s responsibilities arising from the Melbourne Declaration by being more transparent with the public, there is still a way to go – for example, Tasmania is the only jurisdiction where schools do not produce a publicly available annual report, rich in performance data, including from the National School Opinion Survey. There are clearly, however, others who think that the public has no right to be sticking its nose into the business of schools – and regrettably these voices seem to have captured the Review’s ear. Even to the extent of the Review recommending that the Minister ‘re-evaluate the nature and use of data collected’ ensuring that ‘positive changes in trend data are positively reported to the public’, in view of the fact that ‘there is an impression that Tasmanian schools are underperforming when, in fact, more young people than previously, are remaining at school to complete Year 12, which means that there have been positive changes that have occurred in recent years’.9[181]

What concerns us here is not that positive change should not be reported – far from it – but that an honest and searching assessment of the current educational outcomes from Tasmanian schooling – more precisely, the government system of senior secondary schooling – must be the basis for assessing improvement. Much as it might cheer us to know that the safety record of our airline is improving, or that the cancer survival rate of the oncology unit of our hospital is better now than it was a few years ago, that does not tell us what we need to know. How does the safety of our airline compare to others? What is the survival rate of other comparable oncology units? Should I be flying to Melbourne for treatment?

We invite the reader to go back though the statistics reported above by the Review, which seek to assure us that Tasmania is ‘doing well by comparison with other States and Territories of Australia’ and substitute ‘airline fatalities per year’ or ‘cancer survival rates’ for the education performance indicator specified, and see whether they are comfortable that public performance reporting of airline safety or health statistics should accentuate the positive rather than tell things as they are.

6. Finding a basis to fairly evaluate the performance of Tasmania’s senior secondary system

We have argued that the Review’s comparison of the performance of the various jurisdictions’ education systems at senior secondary level does not provide an evidential basis adequate for the making of public policy. We have given reasons why the Productivity

9 That the inference in the sentence just quoted is a non-sequitur – our schools are getting better therefore they are not underperforming – is a more eloquent demonstration of the need for more public access to, and discussion of, performance data than we could hope to provide. Especially discussion which is outward looking and seeking ideas for improvement from elsewhere, rather than inward looking and defensive.

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Commission’s ROGS, which counts actual qualifications, should have been preferred over analyses which are based on self-reporting by respondents to surveys using terms which are widely acknowledged to be confusing (including by the Review Report itself). But we are mindful of claims that Tasmania is sufficiently different from the other jurisdictions – most notably the ACT but also NSW and Victoria in particular, as to make such ROGS data comparisons unfair.

How then might we proceed? We proposed a method in a paper delivered to a research seminar at UTAS (after discussion with senior officers of DoE) and summarised on the Education Ambassadors web site. We used MySchool to identify similar schools to a broadly representative selection of Tasmanian schools (similar based on ICSEA). MySchool also provides school by school data for NAPLAN and Year 12 certificate attainment, while other states’ education databases provide actual, or sound bases for estimating, school year level enrolment, allowing a reasonable estimate of the percentage of Year 10s at a particular school that gain their senior secondary certificate. Even better, for Tasmania TASC direct continuation data gives us the percentage of Year10s at Tasmanian schools that go on to attain their TCE.10 Putting all this data together provides the evidence base for school by school benchmarking, between schools which can reasonably and fairly be compared (according to MySchool), of the relative success of students in Year 9 NAPLAN on the one hand, and their supporting Year10s to continue their education and gain their Year12 certificates, on the other. In brief, the results of this analysis (which covered 10 Tasmanian high schools, the eight public colleges, 151 high schools in other states, four Tasmanian non-government schools and 51 non-government schools in other states) are that while Tasmanian government schools are generally top or near top performers in their interstate similar schools groups for Year 9 NAPLAN, they are generally bottom or near bottom performers for Year 12 certificate attainment. The differences between non-government schools in Tasmania and other states is very much less – which tests the hypothesis that the TCE is more difficult to obtain than the Year12 certificates of the other jurisdictions as an explanation of the lower Year 12 attainment rates from our senior secondary system.

One criticism of this work that we have taken on board is that it only looks at the TCE as an outcome of senior secondary schooling, whereas students also aim for an ATAR or VET certificate, perhaps to the exclusion of the TCE.

The first of these can be dismissed by noting that in 2013 only 58 students who completed the required 120 points of study post-year 10 and gained an ATAR did not qualify for the TCE.11 To answer the second we have recently completed another benchmarking analysis – albeit much more limited than the previous – looking at the rate at which Year 12 students at the Tasmanian colleges gain VET certificates at level II or above. The data for this comes from MySchool, which allowed us to identify a set of schools similar to Rooty Hill High School, which has a similar ICSEA to Tasmanian high schools that are major feeder schools to our colleges.12 We found that the colleges would need to double the rate at which their

10 The full paper ‘Using MySchool to benchmark senior secondary schooling in Tasmania’ and the base data set for the analysis will be found in the Did You Know section of the web site, and the summary in the post ‘Benchmarking Tasmanian NAPLAN and Year 12 attainment rates’, at https://educationambassadors.org.au11 See attachment 3 of our submission to the Review.12 To think in another way about what Rooty Hill High School is like compared to Tasmanian high schools, note that Rooty Hill is located in an electorate which has only ever returned Labor members to the NSW Parliament.

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students are attaining VET qualifications (Cert II or above) to be an average performer in that set of interstate high schools.

This work is simply using public data for benchmarking, as we have done for years in universities, with multiple institutions across the higher education sector forming national and international alliances, like the Go8, ATN, and Universitas21, to facilitate data sharing and gain as much insight as we can from the process. In our experience and that of our senior colleagues across the sector, such benchmarking provides a very sound basis for performance analysis and improvement. In particular, it focuses the attention of educational leaders on the achievements of others and does not allow us to become complacent by considering our performance only against our own history. Indeed, it is so valuable that sometimes we discover that, while we may appear as emperors within the borders of our small lands, we are inappropriately attired for public appearance on a larger stage.

7. Student aspirations

On a more positive note, the Review conducted a survey of students which provides important new data opening up the possibility of a completely different approach to evaluating the performance of our senior secondary system. We can compare students’ actual achievements with their expectations prior to leaving Year 10. This is one of the most valuable and informative features of the Review.

The Review tells us that a common issue raised in their consultations was that the aspirations of students and parents in relation to the completion of Year 12 are lower (or at least a problem) here in Tasmania.[20] This claim is something we have heard also, but always in the context of one group of people talking about another, seeking to explain Tasmania’s low rate of Year 12 attainment by students’ and their families’ lack of aspirations for senior secondary success. It is not something we hear from people themselves, nor does the Review make clear whether they did. We would be surprised if it were so.

Indeed, we were surprised that this view was put to the Review, after being thoroughly debunked by UTAS research reported by Prof Jane Watson in The Mercury [December 10, 2014], which found that 73% of the almost 3000 rural and outer regional students surveyed in a UTAS research project responded that continuing beyond Year 10 was important to them.

The lack of aspiration/blaming the victim explanation for low Year 12 attainment should have been declared dead by the findings of this large ARC funded research project. It was certainly buried by Neighbourhood Houses Tasmania (NHT), which works closely with our most disadvantaged and socially isolated communities. When all the State’s neighbourhood houses were consulted on ‘the number one issue of concern and the number one opportunity to change outcomes in their community, the resounding, even overwhelming response was education’. The resulting NHT budget submission concluded that ‘the current system is not working!’, commended the Government for enabling more communities to provide education through to Year12, and called for significantly more to be enabled to do so.

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And now, one of the most valuable findings of the Review has ensured the cremation of this long held and oft repeated myth. The Review surveyed students in 52 of Tasmania’s 108 schools that offer years 9 and above, with a response rate around 20% in total and higher in the earlier years – about one third of students in Year 10 in government schools.[65] The survey found [Tables 36 and 37, p.74] that

90% of Year 9 and 10 respondents intended to go on to year 11, and of these more than 95% of students, male and female, intended to complete Year 12, and 39.5% of the Year 10s intended to go to university.

How well does our senior secondary schooling provision support these hopes and intentions?

Again the Review does not answer this fundamental question, but we have direct continuation data from TASC that does so, not just for the State as a whole, but school by school , and across all schooling sectors. At the state level, for the 2013 Year 10 cohort, by 201513

41.8% of Year10s in government schools had achieved the TCE, and 21.8% an ATAR 69.0% of Year10s in Catholic schools had achieved the TCE, and 49.1% an ATAR 75.4% of Year10s in Independent schools had achieved the TCE, and 68.2% an ATAR

This is data we might have expected the Review to address, and in particular to put this together with their students survey data to reach the obvious conclusion that our students’ aspirations are simply not being met by their experience of and outcomes from senior secondary schooling, not in any sector, but to the greatest degree – indeed, to a shocking degree – for students in our government schools, the substantial majority of whom are not completing Year 12 despite their aspiration to do so.

These are stark facts which must form the basis for any consideration of the issue of Year 12 attainment in Tasmania, and what reforms to the ‘design and delivery’ of our current system of Yrs 9-12 education might more adequately meet our young people’s currently unfulfilled hopes and frustrated expectations.

Another very valuable part of the Review adds to this picture, by providing the reasons why students left one college before completing their senior secondary studies. [Figure 21, p.152] Over 30% left the college to continue their schooling in a K-12 government school. Over 20% went to an apprenticeship/traineeship. Less than 10% left for TAFE, and about the same number for employment. Interestingly, in summarizing this data (as we have) the Review makes no mention of the dominant reason – leaving college to attend a high school.

8. Staffing

13 According to data provided to the Parliament by the Government in answer to QoN no 26 of 2014, and QoN No. 69 of 2016, asked by the Hon Ruth Forrest, part-time study over three or four years would increase the TCE completion rate by 5% at most. This data was included in our submission to the Review as noted above.

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The discussion of staffing is the most illuminating and, in one respect, most worrying part of the Review. It provides very interesting and useful data, mainly derived from a survey of teachers.

It contains two surprises, and we restrict our comments to these.

First, contrary to the received view that Tasmania lacks the specialist teachers to support increased participation at years 11 and 12, especially in high schools, on the basis of the Review’s survey of teachers, it reports [Table 73, p.99] that in all but two fields there are more teachers qualified to teach years 11 and 12 in a particular field who are not teaching in that field, than there are qualified teachers who are teaching in the field. The first exception is mathematics, where 50.6% of teachers who claimed to be qualified to teach Years 11 and 12 are doing so, while marginally less (49.4%) are not. Taking this data at face value, and of course subject to overcoming other constraints, it seems possible to double the number of qualified mathematics teachers at years 11 and 12 without needing to recruit additional teachers. The other field is VET/VEL, where the news is almost as good – 52.3% of teachers who say they are qualified to teach years 11 and 12 in this field are doing so, while 47.7% similarly qualified are not. Again, this finding implies that there is potential to almost double the qualified teaching effort here should that be needed.

That is a surprising and most encouraging finding which (if these data are accurate) should reshape policy and practice on the issue of ensuring an adequate supply of qualified specialist senior secondary teachers across the State.

The other surprising result is related to this. Commenting on the data from the teacher survey, collated in Table 71 [98], the Review observes

This suggests that quite a low proportion of teachers at high schools believe they have the necessary qualification… to teach senior secondary courses. [98]

They continue by claiming that ‘this has implications for high schools intending to offer such courses’ (but it is not at all clear why this should be so, given the finding discussed above), and that it also has ‘implications for the courses on offer for teachers in Tasmania.’ [98]

This last point is a major concern. The Review earlier [80] reported that about 70% of teachers in Tasmanian high schools gained their initial teacher education qualification here, and thus from UTAS or its antecedents. These teacher education courses, unless there was some Tasmanian peculiarity unknown to us14, would have qualified graduates to teach all years of high school in all jurisdictions in Australia. For a large number of these graduates now to consider that they are not qualified to teach years 11 and 12 reflects very poorly indeed on their initial teacher education, and this must be of concern to the Education Faculty at UTAS which doubtless sees itself as preparing graduates from its secondary teacher education program to teach all levels of high school anywhere in Australia and beyond. This concern might be allayed only by rejecting the findings of the survey conducted by the Review, or postulating that since graduation these teachers have been in some way de-skilled, or persuaded that they have been de-skilled, so that they no longer

14 And the Review: ‘It is not clear what qualification enables a teacher to teach only to level 2’. [98]

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appreciate that they have the necessary training to teach the full range of high school years in their field of expertise. In short, and to be blunt about it, either the UTAS Faculty of Education has (or had) a big problem, or the Department of Education does, or the Review’s findings in this area are unreliable. Clearly, given the plan to increase the number of students undertaking senior secondary education, it is important and urgent for this matter to be resolved.

In passing – to take up the Review’s claim that ‘[A]s telling as the information provided to the review team are the silences, where no information is forthcoming’ [169] – we note that from Table 65 [93] it appears that not all secondary teachers who report that they are qualified to teach in a particular field say that they are qualified to teach Years 7-10.15 The Review did not seem to notice this, commenting only on the high school teachers who do not believe they are qualified to teach the senior years. But just as ‘it is not clear what qualification enables a teacher to teach only to level 2’ of the senior secondary curriculum, it is equally unclear what qualification does not enable a high school or college teacher to teach the junior secondary years. Perhaps many teaching only Years 11 and 12 have also been de-skilled, or believe themselves to have been de-skilled, by the experience. This would explain the statistic, and seems plausible given the stability of the college workforce – 42.5% of college teachers have been teaching only years 11 and 12 for more than 10 years [Table 58, p.88]. No doubt this is a result of Tasmania – unlike the only other jurisdiction with a senior college system, the ACT – not actively transferring teachers between junior and senior high school to ensure that all teachers retain knowledge and skills for teaching across the whole of the secondary years, and that the two parts of the secondary system do not become silos with respect to either curriculum or pedagogy. The impact of this workforce rigidity on teaching and curriculum is again something it would have been very helpful for the Review to consider, rather than pass over in silence.

Returning to the Review’s discussion of initial teacher education, we must object to the Review’s strange recommendation that

The intake of students into ITE [initial teacher education] courses at UTAS is limited to the expected demand within Tasmania. [183]

which they support with the idea that this is required to

ensure that teachers are prepared by UTAS that will meet the requirements of government and non-government schools in Tasmania..[183]

The only way we can make sense of this distinctly odd statement – that is, not simply dismiss it as a non-sequitur – is to attribute to the Review the (even stranger) assumption that teachers trained to teach anywhere else in Australia would not ‘meet the requirements of government and non-government schools in Tasmania’. This is such an absurdly parochial

15 We take it that the base of the percentages in this table is those teachers who are qualified in a certain field not those who are teaching in a certain field. If the latter, that would mean only 34.5% of teachers of Level 4 English in urban schools are qualified to do so. Surely it means, rather, that of the secondary teachers qualified to teach English only 34.5% say they are qualified to teach level 4, while 91.4% say they are qualified to teach years 7-10. And the surprising thing is that all of the numbers should be 100%. If you are qualified to teach (meet teacher registration requirements for) year 7 you are qualified to teach year 12, and vice versa.

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proposition that we cannot believe it would be entertained by any schooling system in Tasmania, and accordingly we expect that this recommendation will be ignored - and that UTAS, operating in a de-regulated international higher education market, will seek to attract as many applicants as possible to initial teacher education programs, and from everywhere in Australia and other countries where Australian teaching qualifications are recognized, with a view to UTAS graduates taking teaching positions anywhere and everywhere in Australia and beyond. Education and parochialism are immiscible liquids.

9. Curriculum

On a more positive note, once again, the Review gives thorough consideration to the nature and extent of the curriculum offerings available in Years 9 to 12. Generally it finds problems of lack of clarity in curriculum documentation, proliferation of subjects particularly at level 2 (and that these often lack challenge for that level), lack of alignment with the Australian curriculum, and the absence of explicit inclusion of the General Capabilities and Core Skills for Work. This leads to a recommendation to ‘Review and update the formal curriculum, assessment, reporting and accreditation requirements’. In our view the Review provides a sound case for this recommendation and indeed the remainder relating to this section [138], but nonetheless there is more that needs to be said on the matter.

Curriculum decision making and documentation has been a controversial matter in Tasmania in recent years, and at times highly politically charged. The former Tasmanian Qualifications Authority (TQA) had faced hostility from some within the teaching profession apparently aroused by its efforts to revise the senior secondary curriculum to bring it up to a nationally comparable (and credible) standard - including reducing the then even more extensive range of accredited units. Whether or not this hostility was influential in the demise of the TQA, the Authority’s work certainly faced opposition amongst teachers (at least by those with influential voices) and had become distinctly unpopular amongst them for attempting to deal with precisely the kinds of problems the Review has now identified. This unedifying history will need to be considered by whoever becomes responsible for undertaking the curriculum renovation the Review recommends, if it is to be successfully completed and to achieve its intended outcomes.

In particular, ensuring the reform of the curriculum will be necessary to manage and contain the expense of expanding the provision of Years 11 and 12. The Review recognizes this issue in the discussion of curriculum, finding

The number of levels of courses, and the variations in the number of hours within each course offered in Tasmania, makes Tasmania unique compared to other Australian states and territories (with the possible exception of the ACT).

This extent of curriculum offerings is also unique given the small size of the secondary student population in Tasmania … and are (sic) likely to have implications for the annual Education Budget in Tasmania. [103]

suggesting, in particular, that

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A detailed financial analysis is undertaken to determine the costs and return on investment of providing such an extensive set of single year curriculum offerings in Years 11 and 12, to determine whether it achieves the purpose of improving attendance, retention and attainment outcomes of students. [104]

and noting

The Review Team was able to identify that there are currently 159 accredited Year 11 and Year 12 courses presented on the TASC web site, from which students in schools and colleges can choose. [105]

This is the reason the Review finds that

The possible consequence of having such a wide suite of curriculum offerings available to a comparatively small cohort of students, is that not all schools can offer a meaningful and comprehensive curriculum in Years 11 and 12, which makes the Extension High School model, very expensive and likely to have low impact and is probably unsustainable. [105]

However this conclusion only follows from the premises offered if we assume that the ‘uniquely wide suite of curriculum offerings’ is required for a ‘meaningful and comprehensive curriculum’ and thus should not be reformed and reduced. But since the Review has already cast doubt on the value of the ‘wide suite of curriculum offerings’, we cannot find any evidence or argument in the Review that supports this conclusion about the great expense, predicted low impact and unsustainability of the ‘extension high school model’. Here again comparison with the more successful senior secondary programs of the other states (in which even the smallest and most remote high schools almost universally, and successfully, offer all the years of secondary education) would have been a surer and more useful guide to good policy.

10. VET and VEL

The Review canvasses a range of concerns about VET/VEL, but makes just two recommendations both of which address the public perception of the value of VET in schools and raising its status through the development of a future vision for the area. While we do not claim expertise in this area, the Review’s discussion here appears thorough and sensible in relation to the issues it takes up. There is, however, another surprising silence. In stark contrast to the Review’s discussion of the TCE and the ATAR, the Review does not attempt to place the performance of Tasmania’s senior secondary schools as VET providers in a national context, even though the data required to do this – at least at school level – is readily to hand on MySchool. It is hard to see how the recommendations the Review does make about action to improve the public perception of VET/VEL in schools could proceed without such an analysis, if it is to avoid being totally inward looking.

For example, from Table 83 [149] we learn that in 2015 the colleges, operating through their collective RTO, produced 97 certificate IIIs – which the Review uses as the VET equivalent of a Year 12 certificate – and 787 certificate IIs, representing, respectively, 3% and 24% of their total of 3,248 Yr12/13 students (student numbers from TASC school data profiles). How

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does this compare to VET certificate II and III attainment rates from the high schools in other jurisdictions? Put in a national context, are Tasmania’s VET attainment rates from the public system low or high? And if low, is this due to fewer of our students undertaking studies towards a certificate II or III, or fewer successfully completing these studies? In other words, if there are issues with Tasmania’s VET/VEL in schools, are they due to reputation and marketing, or the performance of the system, or both? The Review is silent on the matter leaving the Government and the education system bereft of its advice on how it should usefully proceed with respect to these matters.

11. The TCE

Turning its attention to the TCE, the Review reports hostility amongst their informants towards the ‘ticks’ system by which students can show they have required skills in literacy, numeracy and ICT, (if they have not met these requirements in virtue of their subject choices). The Review recommends abolishing the ‘ticks’, suggesting instead that other approaches be considered, including

• Requiring students to reach Level 8 on NAPLAN in reading, spelling and numeracy; • Embedding the General Capabilities and the Core Skills for Work; and/or • Reviewing all existing course documents to update which courses receive recognition that successful completion of the course also brings with it one or more ticks.

While the third of these suggestions seems useful, the other two should be considered with much care in particular with respect to the likelihood of unintended adverse consequences.

Currently the TCE is a very flexible senior secondary certificate – indeed, the most flexible and accommodating in Australia for students with different learning interests and wishing to undertake different pathways. All other jurisdictions require students to take specific subjects in order to qualify for their Yr 12 certificate. A student may gain the TCE, however, in a variety of ways and in a variety of settings, including entirely with vocational studies, as the TASC web site makes clear

Many learners will show that they meet or do better than this standard [for participation and achievement] with a reasonably challenging two-year program of study at senior secondary level with at least 1,200 hours of study in senior secondary subjects. Others will show that they meet or do better than this standard with a full program of VET studies. Some people will use combinations of senior secondary studies, VET, and other qualifications we recognize. Some people will complete an apprenticeship to show that they meet or do better than this standard.

The ‘ticks’ tests are a safety net, designed to allow students to demonstrate their mastery of literacy, numeracy and ICT without constraining their subject choices. Thus they are intended to cater for this breadth of study options, ensuring that students gain basic skills in the three core areas without the rigidity introduced by specifying compulsory areas of study.

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Other jurisdictions meet this requirement for students to demonstrate skills in literacy, and less commonly, numeracy, by requiring students to take particular subjects or kinds of subjects. The VCAL, for example, requires students to take a literacy unit and a numeracy unit. The SACE requires students to take an English and a mathematics subject, and to achieve at least a C if the subjects are taken at Stage 1, or a C- if taken at Stage 2. (Note here that a student may count a subject towards their TCE with a grade of no more than Preliminary Achievement.)

Should the ‘ticks’ be abolished without some other measure being adopted, Tasmania would stand alone in not requiring some demonstration of at least literacy. If this is not intended and the ‘tests for the ticks’ are abolished in favour of these general capabilities being embedded in subjects, such subjects would then need to be made compulsory for all students.

As to the Review’s suggestion that the ‘ticks’ be replaced by the requirement that students achieve level 8 in NAPLAN for reading, spelling and numeracy, this would need careful consideration to ensure it would not lead to unintended consequences – even if we put aside the question of whether a 21st Century curriculum could credibly prioritize spelling over ICT literacy.

The NAPLAN test is already a cause of concern to teachers and parents, here as elsewhere across the country, with accusations that educational leaders in both the bureaucracy and government have allowed NAPLAN to become a ‘high stakes’ test, which is assuming, according to many, too great a place in the curriculum. To have it a make-or-break experience for students in relation to attaining their Year12 certificate would tremendously exacerbate this problem. This could only be mitigated by allowing students to re-sit their Year 9 NAPLAN test until they achieve level 8, or leave school, not an attractive option for either students or schools. And, of course, this keeps the current arrangement of testing to ‘get your ticks’ albeit in a different form, so is no advance for those who claim that the requirement for the ‘ticks’ constitutes a barrier to some students attaining the TCE.

Worse, a quick reading of the 2016 NAPLAN National Report reveals that the requirement for students to attain band 8 or above in all of the Yr 9 NAPLAN tests for reading, spelling and numeracy would reduce the rate of TCE completion in 2019 to at most 41.9% of the year 9 cohort (assuming there will no further test available). Moreover, this requirement would make the TCE attainable by only 20.4% of Year 9 students whose parents report year 11 as their last year of education, and 23.6% of Indigenous students – since these are the percentages of these students, in each case, which met all of the NAPLAN requirements proposed by the Review.

These outcomes are clearly unacceptable. Consequently, NAPLAN cannot be used in place of the ‘ticks’ system. At most NAPLAN could be an alternative test for getting the ‘ticks’ for those students who achieve band 8 or above in whichever of the fields are thought to represent essential skills for adult life.

12. Structure

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The last major issue the Review takes up is the structure of Years 9 to 12. Here they observe that there ‘seems to be considerable support for the government senior college system’, which is seen to ‘largely meet the needs of students who currently attend senior colleges’, while there are concerns that the current system ‘works against students, particularly from rural areas, who see going to a senior college as a major transition and, for some, a ‘bridge too far’. [165] There is no information given as to the source of these assessments nor on what those who make these claims base their judgment. Thus it appears that the Review has taken these views as fact, without identifying evidence which might warrant their adoption.

Indeed, the discussion of structure proceeds without any interrogation of these views at all. But what does it mean that the system ‘largely meets the needs of students who currently attend’? If this statement means that a substantial majority of students who enroll in a college gain a qualification as a result of their study, the claim is false, as data we provided to the Review shows (Attachment 4 to our submission).

Just 50.3% of the 4,314 students who enrolled in the colleges as Year 11s in 2013 had gained their TCE by 2015 – which includes students who studied over three years

And according to the Review [Table 11, p.56] by 2015 only 1,600 or 24.1% of this cohort – Year 10s in 2012 – achieved a VET certificate at any level, from any VET provider16

Apparently, the colleges themselves would have awarded fewer than 900 of these VET certificates, since, as we learn from the Review Table 12 [57], from 2012 – 2014 the number of VET qualifications issued annually to 15-19 year olds who participated in VET in schools hovered around 900

And of these, in 2014 just 225 were certificate III and 9 certificate IV

Now according to the Review, only certificate III and above should be considered to be the equivalent of a Year 12 certificate (the TCE), so all this confusing data boils down to this:

If we look at all of the 4,314 students who enrolled in Year 11 in 2013 in one of the colleges, 2,169 had completed their TCE by 2015, and also something like 250 VET qualifications equivalent to Year12 had been attained by this cohort.

Even if we assume there was no overlap between these groups and thus ignore the double counting of students who achieved both the TCE and a VET certificate at level III or IV, that means at most around 2,400 or 55% of students enrolling in a college achieved a qualification as the result of their studies.

How can the Review present this outcome as ‘largely meeting the needs’ of students who embark on their senior secondary education at college – when they stated as their first principle that

Completion of Year 12 at school or its equivalent is an expectation of every student. [19]

16 The scope of the collection of this VET data is made clear in the TASC Annual Report 2015/16 p. 20.

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We can only conclude that the Review took the testimony of others as to the success of the colleges as fact, rather than investigating the matter for themselves. Certainly this seems to be the case for their next claim, that the ‘colleges work well for students in the city but not for rural students.’ For if the Review had looked at the TASC direct continuation data for the 2013 Year 10 cohort (Year 12 in 2015) they would have quickly found data that undermines that assertion.

Consider, for example, two collections of six high schools, rural and city, comparable by ICSEA (for 2013, as shown in brackets following the schools’ names): Campania District School (860), Mountain Heights School (880), Triabunna District School (885), Campbell Town District High School (903), Cressy District School (920), St Marys District School (929), Tasman District School (935) and Lilydale High School (945), for the rural schools group; and Cosgrove High School (851), Rokeby High School (866), Brooks High School (870), Montrose Bay High School (893), Parklands High School (893), Reece High School (931), Kings Meadows High School (944) and Queechy High School (944), for the city group. For these schools, chosen without reference to the Year 12 outcomes of their former Year 10 students, we found (as illustrated in the graphs below) that the simple trend line against ICSEA

for TCE attainment goes from just under 40% to about 48% for the rural schools, whereas it is almost flat at about 35% for the city schools

for attaining a VET certificate, both trend lines start at about 27%, but while the rural school’s trend of VET achievement against ICSEA is flat, for the city schools it declines to 20%

and for achieving an ATAR, again the trend against ICSEA starts at a higher level for the rural schools (about 12% as against 8%), with both ending up at around 20%

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Graph 1: Year12 outcomes for students from rural high schools*

Campain

a Distr

ict Sc

hool

Moutain Heig

hts Sch

ool

Triab

unna Distr

ict Sch

ool

Campbell

Town Distr

ict High

School

Cressy

District

High Sc

hool

St Mary

s Dist

rict S

chool

Tasman

District

School

Lilydale

Distric

t High

School

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

840

860

880

900

920

940

960% of 2013 Yr10s gaining TCE by 2015

Linear (% of 2013 Yr10s gaining TCE by 2015)

% of 2013 Yr10s gaining ATAR by 2015

Linear (% of 2013 Yr10s gaining ATAR by 2015)

% of 2013 Yr10s gaining VET certificate by 2015

Linear (% of 2013 Yr10s gaining VET certificate by 2015)

ICSEA (2013)

Graph 2: Year12 outcomes for students from city high schools*

Cosgrove High

School

Rokeby High

School

Brooks High

School

Montrose Bay High School

Parklands High

School

Reece High School

Kings Meadows

High School

Queechy High

School-10%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

840

860

880

900

920

940

960

% of 2013 Yr10s gaining TCE by 2015

Linear (% of 2013 Yr10s gaining TCE by 2015)

% of 2013 Yr10s gaining ATAR by 2015

Linear (% of 2013 Yr10s gaining ATAR by 2015)

% of 2013 Yr10s gaining VET certificate by 2015

Linear (% of 2013 Yr10s gaining VET certificate by 2015)

ICSEA (2013)

*Note: Yr10 date (was 2012) in in both graphs’ legend corrected 18 April 2017

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This TASC data suggests very strongly that the college system of senior secondary education works somewhat better for rural students than for students in city schools with comparable ICSEAs. There is no obvious argument, therefore, for ‘rolling out Years 11 and 12’ in rural but not city schools if the aim of the policy it to increase attainment, measured by the award of the TCE, the gaining of a VET certificate, or the achievement of an ATAR. Rather, it is poverty – or, more precisely, low ICSEA – that is likely responsible for students falling into the gap between Year 10 and Year 12 attainment. Addressing this inequality – as all other jurisdictions have done more successfully than Tasmania, as we have shown elsewhere – is surely the major challenge to which the Review might have risen. Regrettably the Review team seems to have been content to repeat what ‘seems obvious’ and ‘everyone knows’ rather than interrogate such received views by considering the data for themselves.

Returning to a theme of the Review – the public availability of key education statistics – we trust the direct continuation data for each school published by the TASC, used above, was not in the Review’s mind when suggesting that ‘some of the publicly released data are more appropriate for internal planning … and not for public consumption.’[163] For without this data it would not be possible to test the meme (repeated without scrutiny by the Review) that the current system of senior secondary schooling is mainly a problem for young people who live some distance from a college, as above. No doubt this will be of great interest not just to members of the public generally, but particularly to politicians who represent the less advantaged (low ICSEA) city electorates in which, judging from the data we have presented here, young people are not being well served by the current system and thus would likely be even more advantaged by the roll out of Years 11 and 12 to their local high schools than students in rural communities.

We now turn to a set of challenges which the Review identified from their consultations, discussing just two of these.

The first, student aspirations, we have commented on above. We might have hoped, however, that the Review would have provided more detail of the mismatch between what the students report about their aspirations for their future, and assertions about Tasmania’s students made by others with whom the Review team met. In particular, if the Review found that teachers or others responsible for education under-estimate students’ commitment to their own education this should have been identified as a serious problem which needs to be determinedly addressed if levels of attainment are to be raised – not least because of the well established influence of teachers’ expectations on their students’ educational outcomes. Perhaps the Review is hinting at this in saying

Linked to the aspirations of students and parents is the overall culture of Tasmanian school education. Any changes to the organisation, structure and conduct of education requires considerable community consultation.[162]

Whatever the Review intended by this comment, it is regrettable that it was not made explicit.

Finally we turn to the Review’s recommendation that Tasmania create networked, multi-campus schools, comprising colleges and high schools.

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We are thoroughly familiar with working in a multi-campus environment (at university) and are aware of both the advantages that arise from a group of smaller, separate educational institutions being amalgamated into a larger whole, and some of the difficulties of making such arrangements work well. Accordingly, we are certainly not opposed to the idea of network schools in principle. However, a glaring omission in the Review’s discussion of this matter is consideration of why network schools might be a good solution to providing Years 11 and 12 in Tasmanian high schools, when it has not been found necessary nor indeed desirable as the common model in any of the other jurisdictions. Certainly the list of multi-campus schools in other states which the Review provides as precedents [174] do not provide any example of, nor evidence for, what the Review is proposing – that students should have to study on more than one school campus in order to complete their senior secondary education. All of these multi-campus schools, as it appears from their web sites, offer complete and comprehensive programs for years 11 and 12 on a single campus, with Denison College in Bathurst having two 7-12 campuses so closely located that students are able (but not required) to take courses from either, for example to reduce the chances that a subject choice will not be offered at a convenient time, as well as offering some campus specific specialization.

Why should Tasmania find it necessary to bus students from school to school – or even have them board away from home – to access a senior secondary education of the quality available to students in even small rural communities in other states? And what will we do for students in less advantaged urban communities in Tasmania within easy commuting distance of a college, where it seems even fewer students are currently receiving the benefits of a Yr 12 qualification than their country cousins?

Thus, while network schools might be an improvement on the status quo, not least in blurring the boundaries between the staffing, curriculum and pedagogical silos which have grown up between Yr 7-10 and Yrs 11-12 in the Tasmanian public system, the Review provides no evidence whatsoever to show this would not be a sub-optimal outcome for Tasmania.

If only the Review had been prepared to look outwards, to choose any statistic it thought usefully described a positive result of senior secondary schooling for students, then compared the outcomes for students from Tasmanian schools with those from a whole range of different kinds of schools in other states, matching the diversity of our schools, we expect it would have made a different recommendation. Not a recommendation to put what we currently do in the centre of consideration, and then work out how to try to adapt that to the 21st century reality that, as the Review puts it,

Completion of Year 12 at school or its equivalent is an expectation of every student [19].

But a recommendation to put the interests of our young people in the centre of the analysis and then be willing to ask whether the creation of a split system of secondary education, established in an age when it was thought ‘Year 12 is not for everyone’, is now a policy dinosaur which we should be brave enough to walk away from.

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And had they done that, they might then have suggested where we might head to transform Tasmanian senior secondary education. That is, after all, how a team coming into a situation with fresh eyes and experience from elsewhere adds value to local considerations.

We do not attempt to make such suggestions ourselves, but we cannot conclude without noting that senior secondary schooling in Tasmania is on the move. The latest news is that the TCE attainment rate has increased by 6% in the last year. Government school principals in particular are stepping forward to lead change, and being supported by the leadership of the Department of Education. What we need now is an honest, but ambitious conversation led by these change-makers about how this wonderful increase has been achieved, and whether we can expect sustained improvement by continuing the path of change already embarked upon, or whether more transformational system-wide change will be required for Tasmania not just to improve on our own past performance, but aspire to lead in education just as we lead in so many other fields.

Eleanor Ramsay and Michael Rowan, April 2017

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