INTRODUCTION
The beginning of the 1990s finds ambitious and controversial reforms being made to school education in Victoria. Changes of a different but no less far-reaching nature are underway in New South Wales and the United Kingdom. This raises questions of concern to teachers, parents, educationists and business people alike. My second major publication, "Education Examined," set out to examine the latest developments in all three school systems, paying particular attention to the core aspects of education -- what is taught and how it is assessed.
A number of significant themes emerges from the "Education Examined" papers. One of them is the importance of standardized inter-school testing as an aid to failure-prevention. The new British system will test every child at the ages of seven, 11, 14, and 16. It is also based on attainment targets rather than competitive comparisons. I stress that it is vital to identify pupils suffering deficiencies in basic skills at seven, in order to prevent them falling further and further behind their peers in later years.
Similarly in New South Wales, the Basic Skills Testing Program being applied in primary schools measures the skills of individual children according to set skill bands, rather than competitive comparisons. New South Wales is to publish State-wide aggregate results and the results of significant sub-groups in the program, and also tells parents what their own children have achieved; but school "scores" are reserved for the guidance only of the schools themselves. It is also stressed to teachers in the State that they should use Basic Skills Test results as a basis for assigning students to special classes only in conjunction with other forms of assessment.
A recurring theme in the papers is the need for a core curriculum -- although views of what the core need comprise, and how it should be applied, vary markedly. The trend in Britain is towards greater centralized prescription of the knowledge and skills required of pupils at specific levels. In Victoria, general guidelines about outcomes, issued by the central Ministry, are combined with a greater emphasis on local discretion. New South Wales appears to be charting a course between the other systems increasing local responsibility for implementation but retaining strong guidance and support from the central Department. It should perhaps be noted that all three systems favour some devolution in school financial management.
With both the third and fourth chapters of the publication being devoted to Victorian education, many mixed and conflicting views of the new Victorian Certificate of Education are expressed. The issues of contention included: the workload, for both pupils and schools; the reliability of the new methods of assessment; the suggested "parity of esteem" between all subjects, from physics to textiles; and the new compulsory subject, Australian Studies. The third chapter argues that the VCF answered a growing demand for "comprehensive and common schooling through to Year 12."
Over 300 people were interviewed for these papers, including parents, teachers and school principals, academics, policy-makers and business professionals; although it has not been possible to include their many interesting comments in this collection, the papers remain a useful and compact guide to the new thinking and changes occurring in our schools.
EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN BRITAIN
IN this chapter I wish to describe briefly the changes that are taking place in the British educational system, with a look back at the scene prior to the Education Reform Act of 1988, which they are now in the process of implementing.
This Reform Act is quite the most important piece of legislation in education since the Education Act of 1944. It went through both Houses of Parliament with amazing speed, and with very little in the way of alteration. One of the reasons for this is that a general consensus had developed about the main thrust of the Bill, namely, the need for a national curriculum and the need for a national assessment program to back it up.
I shall discuss the issues of the national curriculum and national assessment in greater detail later in this chapter. Now I will just mention the main aspects of the rest of the Reform Act.
From one perspective, the Bill's main aims were to give greater freedom of choice to parents and greater autonomy to the schools. Looked at from another point of view, it was an attack on local government and a general disruption of the educational system.
PARENTAL CHOICE AND SCHOOL AUTONOMY
The Act allows schools, if they so wish -- and if the parents of the children at these schools so wish -- to opt out of control by their Local Education Authority, and to be funded directly by government grant. Through opting out they become Grant Maintained Schools.
In a parallel move, schools called City Technology Colleges, or CTCs, funded directly by government grant, are being set up. The CTCs are intended to become centres of excellence concentrating on scientific and technical matters. They will be open to all children who have a bent towards science and technology, and whose parents want them to attend such a school.
The new Act permits schools to take in as many pupils as their buildings will physically accommodate. This used not to be the case. Schools had a quota which they could not exceed. The rule that parents had to send their children to the school nearest to them, within their Local Authority's area, has also gone. Parents now have the right to choose where to send their children -- even to send them outside their Local Authority.
Another of the changes addresses the composition of school governing bodies. The school governing bodies have been given much more power because the financial control of the schools is being devolved from the Local Education Authority to the school itself, and the governing bodies are now responsible for the financial management of the school. Accordingly, more parent governors and more governors from local industry and commerce have been brought in. This is seen -- depending on where you stand politically -- either as taking away power from local government or as giving much greater choice to parents and more freedom to individual schools.
THE NEED FOR A CORE CURRICULUM
The main thrust of the Act, obviously, is to introduce a national curriculum. They've never had a national curriculum in Britain. Previously, Local Authorities and schools were free to teach whatever they liked to whomever they liked, either to the whole school or to sections of it. Thus, for example, schools could or need not teach a foreign language, and if they did, they could or need not teach it to all children. It was very much in the hands of the head of the school.
In the past, also, children had considerable autonomy. At age 13 they could choose which subjects to opt out of and which to continue studying. The result was that boys in enormous numbers opted out of studying languages, and girls in equally enormous numbers gave up maths and science -- a trend clearly not good for their future work-force.
Because of a decline in population which is about to affect 18 year-olds, there is going to be a real shortage of school-leavers in the next several years. It is therefore a matter of real concern to them if children are opting out of very important subjects at the age of 13. The worry is particularly great in maths and science, where they already have a chronic shortage of teachers. With girls steadily opting out of these subjects, the situation clearly will not improve. By introducing a national curriculum, which will be obligatory for all children aged five to 16, they hope to put an end to some of the difficulties introduced by the opting out procedure.
INTRODUCING THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM
What other reasons are there for introducing a national curriculum?
According to the previous Secretary of State, the national curriculum will:
- give a clear incentive for weaker schools to catch up with the best, and the best will be challenged to do better;
- provide teachers with detailed and precise objectives;
- provide parents with clear, accurate information;
- ensure continuity and progression from one year to another, from one school to another;
- help teachers concentrate on getting the best possible results from each individual child.
To this summary I would add that they are doing very poorly indeed in England and Wales in their retention of pupils over the age of 16. The compulsory school attendance ages in England are five to 16, though it is becoming more common for four year-olds to be accepted into primary schools. This is due mainly to falling rolls and the consequence that schools in some parts of the country now have a lot of empty places. They hope that the introduction of the national curriculum will help to improve the post-16 staying-on rate.
The new national curriculum has a set of core subjects: mathematics, science, and English (or Welsh in Welsh-speaking areas). The other subjects are history, geography, design and technology, music, art, physical education, and for those over the age of 11 -- that is, children in secondary schools -- a modern foreign language.
The curriculum has been developed by a number of working groups charged with the responsibility of devising attainment targets and programs of study in each subject area. Problems arose because the groups worked subject by subject. First there was the mathematics working group, then the science and English-Welsh groups, then the design and technology group, the history group, the geography group, and finally, the foreign languages group. Each of these groups was, of course, fighting for its place in the sun.
This was tolerable when they were working with only the core subjects. Once the other subject areas were developed, they produced an enormous amount of paper and a huge, over-detailed and over-ambitious, curriculum. When the teaching profession saw the amount of paper coming their way, and the enormous number of attainment targets to which they were expected to teach, there was a considerable outcry.
Only recently has this started to have an effect. The new Secretary of State, John McGregor, has announced that as far as seven year-olds and 11 year-olds are concerned, the core curriculum will be the most important part of the national curriculum, and the only part that will be nationally assessed.
ATTAINMENT TARGETS
The whole curriculum is seen in terms of 10 levels, starting with Level 1 as children enter school, and ending with Level 10 when they reach the end of compulsory schooling at age 16. There are attainment targets for each level, setting out the knowledge, skills, and understanding that pupils of different abilities and maturities are expected to develop. Here is an example of an attainment target for young primary students doing Level 2 science. The children will be expected to be able to:
- ask questions and suggest ideas of the "how", "why", and "what will happen if" variety.
- identify simple differences, e.g. hot/cold, rough/smooth.
- use non-standard and standard measures, e.g. hand/spans and rulers.
- interpret findings by associating one factor with another, e.g. the pupils' perception at this level that "light objects float".
- record findings in charts, drawings, and other appropriate forms.
To give you the feel of an attainment target at a similar level but in another subject, let's look at English. In Reading, at Level 1, pupils will be expected to:
- recognize that print is used, to carry meaning, in books and in other forms.
- begin to recognize individual words or letters in familiar contexts.
- show signs of a developing interest in reading.
- talk in simple terms about the content of stories, or information in non-fiction books.
Since they now have well over 200 attainment targets, you can see why teachers might feel a bit daunted at the thought of having both to teach to these targets and to have the attainment targets assessed.
PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT
Yet just as there was general agreement that they needed a national curriculum (though not general agreement about a program as specific and detailed as this one), so there has also been general agreement that they needed an assessment program.
This is not to say that they have not assessed children in the past, but they have never assessed them in quite this way. In the past, in basic areas like reading and mathematics, they have run national surveys on a sampling basis. This process has not affected the futures of individual children, but it has given them a national broad-brush picture of the state of play in a given year.
Recently, their national surveys have tended more and more towards performance assessment: that is, not written tests in the multiple-choice format, which have never won much favour in England and Wales, but tests in which children are asked to show what they understand and can do, as well as what they can recognize and write about. In the last 15 years or so they have been very concerned with assessing children's spoken language and their practical science and maths skills. An emphasis on performance has been built into the new assessment program.
The national assessment program is going to affect every child aged seven, 11, 14, and 16. They are currently pilot-testing the national assessment materials with a national two per cent sample of seven year-olds. Next year will be the full dummy run: that is, all seven year-olds will be assessed in the core subjects of maths, science, and language but the results will not be publicly reported. In 1992 there will be the real McCoy: all seven year-olds will not only be assessed, but the results will be reported.
There was, of course, considerable debate about these ages, particularly the issue of whether or not seven year-olds should be assessed. There was quite a strong body of opinion that considered it inappropriate to test children as young as seven. There was an equally strong body of opinion that believed it was absolutely essential to test children at the age of seven in order to intervene and give help to those who were failing to master the basic skills -- essentially, a failure prevention program.
We have enormous amounts of evidence which show that if children do not get a good grip on the basic areas at seven, they never really catch up, and so fall behind more and more as they move through their school career. As a consequence, the view that it is vital to intervene has won the day.
UNOBTRUSIVE TESTS
Although some people will raise their hands in horror at the thought of seven year-olds doing tests, the tests and assessment materials being developed, which are called Standard Assessment Tasks, or SATs, are nothing like the traditional ones. They are a series of activities, rather than the paper and pencil tests they have known in the past. In a normal classroom situation they are meant to be unobtrusive, so that to the naked eye they look like the normal activities that go on in a primary school. They also must be manageable, and acceptable to the teaching force.
Standard Assessment Tasks are theme-based and cross-curricular: theme-based, because they are all built around general themes like "Myself and My Family", "The World About Us", or "Toys and Games" -- subjects in which seven year-olds are interested: and cross-curricular, because they involve the children in scientific, mathematical, and linguistic activities related to this theme.
The wide range of activities include some suitable for individual children (e.g. a child reading aloud to the teacher) and some suitable for small groups (e.g. children co-operating in planning and conducting, recording, and later reporting a simple scientific experiment). To complete a SAT, the children will be carrying out experiments, making things, having discussions with one another and their teacher, observing, recording, making graphs -- a host of real and meaningful things.
To give you an example: the issue might be the circumstances in which materials melt or freeze. They might ask the seven year-olds to plan an experiment to find out how long it takes ice cubes to melt in different circumstances. This involves them in trying to figure out what would be a true test, planning how it should be set up, and then actually carrying out the test -- making the observations, recording them in a suitable form like a graph, and reporting their findings and interpretations to their group or teacher or to the rest of the class in spoken or written form.
Some of the SAT activities go on over several weeks, and none is timed -- they are not interested in how fast children can do things. The SATs are planned so that they are naturally embedded in a period of about five weeks of teaching which occurs towards the end of the summer term in which the children become seven. It happens at this time for good reason. They want to see what children can do as near as possible towards the end of that school year, but it cannot be right at the end -- there has to be time for tests to be scored and a report made that the teacher can then convey to the child's parents before the end of term. It is no good waiting until the start of the next school year to tell parents how their child has done.
The SATs are planned as reflections of what they consider to be the best of classroom practice as they know it at the moment. This means that they have been worked out in conjunction with groups of teachers, tried out informally and then more formally in a large number of classrooms, and revised and refined in the light of actual performance. This takes time, but makes for materials that are readily acceptable in the classroom.
Right now the SATs are being tried out on a nationwide random sample of schools containing seven year-old children. It is vital that they reflect good classroom practice, because what is assessed is bound to have an impact on what is taught. They need to decide in advance what sort of things they would be happy to see children practising and carrying out in the normal classroom, and once they have figured out what those should be, they become embodied in the activities.
This means that there is no sharp dividing line between teaching and assessing. The two activities look very much like one another, and in fact the children themselves do not know they are being assessed. All they know is that they are involved in activities which are a lot of fun and very absorbing. They get totally caught up in what they are doing.
ACCESSIBILITY
The SATs are designed to be accessible to the widest possible range of children, permitting them to do the absolute best of which they are capable. Where necessary, therefore, the activities are modified to allow children with handicaps and difficulties of whatever kind to participate and be assessed on the national curriculum attainment targets.
If a child is blind or partially-sighted, materials will be provided in braille or the child will use whatever technical help is normally provided in the classroom. If children are physically unable to write but able to use a word processor, they can be assessed on every aspect of writing except handwriting (hence the attainment target for handwriting would not be applied). Children whose home language is not English, or children insufficiently familiar with English to express themselves well in it, can tackle all parts of the assessment, except those that focus on English itself, in their home language.
TEACHER CHOICE AND THE S.A.T.s
They have no problem with teaching to the test. In fact, they wouldn't mind at all if teachers taught to the test all year long. That's because the sorts of things children will be asked to do are in themselves very worthwhile.
At the beginning of each school year, with the help of a synopsis of the SATs and of suggested materials and activities suitable for them, teachers choose the Standard Assessment Tasks they will complete at the end of the year. This enables them to work towards the SAT throughout the year, and to make sure that the theme they have chosen integrates naturally with the teaching of the earlier part of the year.
The question of how much data should be collected for each SAT is still being debated. The original intention was that every single attainment target should be assessed. But because there are now well over 200 of these around, my view very strongly is that assessing them all would be an overload. What is required is a slimmed-down version of what they are currently pilot-testing. In my view, a good test is not one that struggles to test every aspect of a child's repertoire, but one which focuses on significant aspects.
If you think about it, there really isn't any test known to man that attempts to test every aspect of behaviour in a particular area. Consider driving tests, ballet exams, ice-skating contests, final exams for degrees. These tests, and all others, sample: they do not cover the waterfront. So their new tests do not have to cover every single thing exhaustively. The two strands proposed under the new national assessment program will tell them what they need to know.
The first strand is the teacher's own informal assessments, made during the course of the year. The other strand is the externally provided SATs. Both are meant to operate together. In my view, it is quite reasonable to expect the teacher's informal assessments to cover much more than the externally provided SATs.
It is possible that parents will require quite detailed information, but I doubt that even they would want it to be detailed attainment target by attainment target. It is more likely that they will want to see the data in terms of overall profile components, by which I mean the very large divisions within subject areas. In language, for example, the profile components would be speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and a child would be assessed and be assigned to a level on each one. At the higher levels, that is at the school and at the Local Education Authority levels, the data would be aggregated so local and national statistics on levels of performance could be generated.
What needs to be stressed, in any event, is that the national curriculum and the SATs are closely integrated. There is no dividing line between them. That is quite unlike the set-up in which external tests which really have very little to do with what is actually taught in the classroom are brought into a school and administered.
TEACHERS CENTRAL TO ASSESSMENT PROCESS
The teacher, of course, is absolutely central to the whole assessment process. As well as administering and scoring the SATs, teachers will be providing their own informal assessment throughout the year and orchestrating the tasks assigned during the administration of the SATs. There will be considerable flexibility in sequencing, introducing, and carrying out the SAT activities. Nobody will be forced to alter a basic teaching style.
The current crop of SATs have been devised to provide teachers with five weeks' worth of teaching and assessing material. But not everything that goes on during this five week period will be assessed. Because the activities sometimes involve groups of children, sometimes individuals, and sometimes a whole class, the teacher has to be able to focus on these different groupings. On some occasions children will be working independently while the teacher concentrates on hearing individuals read or works with a small group who are carrying out a scientific experiment. This means that a whole set of assessed and unassessed activities going on naturally at the same time must be planned and orchestrated appropriately.
Obviously, assessing in this way demands a number of skills from the teacher. The teacher has to observe very closely and without intervention when necessary, listen in a concentrated way to children talking, and make frequent assessments on the spot which must be recorded later (e.g. "How much did this child contribute to the group discussion?"). In addition, the teacher must assess tangible evidence of achievement such as portfolio writing, solved maths problems, and recorded scientific observations.
The whole teaching force in primary schools is being given in-service training in this approach to assessment. I think the new methods constitute a very positive step indeed, and will lead to a considerable development of the teacher's own professionalism. Certainly the teachers they have worked with have been very, very enthusiastic. So have the children, who have really enjoyed the process.
ERADICATING BIAS
Naturally, when developing material of this kind, they have had to be very careful not to produce materials that are biased against any particular group of children. One considerable difficulty for them has been in finding reading material that was not totally focused on the white, sex-stereotyped, middle-class, nuclear family: father, mother, and two children. they have looked care- fully at published reading materials for seven year-olds because they don't use specially made test material, but published books. In the available literature, children from different ethnic backgrounds are very often invisible.
Even in books dealing with children from different ethnic backgrounds they have had difficulty finding illustrators who could depict children without reverting to stereotypes. To solve this problem on their own materials, they have used children's own drawings and paintings of themselves as illustrations. This has worked very well because the children's art work tends to be vague as to sex, and because children tend to be much more sympathetic to children from different ethnic backgrounds than are professional illustrators.
Our plan for the future is to provide teachers with a list of published books for seven year-olds which are of very high quality and show no evidence of bias. This will eventually be public knowledge, and I think it will actually oblige publishers to pay attention to the criteria for high quality reading material for seven year-olds.
NO SOFT OPTION
One of the things I want to emphasize is that the SATs are not a soft option. There is a school of thought in England and Wales that believes that unless you have got something that looks like a norm-referenced standardized test you are somehow taking an easy path. would strongly refute that assumption. Like any traditional test materials, the SATs have to reach very high standards of reliability and validity.
Some people criticize the SATs because of the widespread fallacy that there are such things as objective tests (by which people usually mean norm-referenced multiple-choice tests). There is, however, no such thing as an objective test. There are tests which can be marked objectively, either by machines or by unskilled markers, but the test items themselves have been devised and selected by human beings who have applied to that task a lot of value-laden judgment. What the SATs do is involve the professional judgment of teachers.
It's been said to me when I've made remarks like this, "Well, do you actually trust the teachers to mark these things?" My answer is, "We trust them to educate our children, and this seems to me a very small extra step." I really cannot see why any teacher should want to do anything other than to provide a setting in which pupils will be able to do the very best of which they are capable. Certainly the teachers they have worked with, and are working with, have been highly professional in their approach. The results compare in reliability with anything I have ever seen when traditional tests have been used.
POSTSCRIPT
Since my return from Australia, the first generation of SATs has been pilot-tested nationwide. The results have borne out my prediction that the sheer volume of the material would prove unmanageable in the time available, although the activities themselves were widely praised by the teachers. The first full-scale testing, to take place next summer, will need to be on a considerably slimmed-down basis. Also as expected, they found that teachers varied considerably in their ability to make detailed and accurate observations of individual children's performance, particularly when a child was working as part of a group. This will obviously be a priority area for in-service training during the course of the coming year. Given that the SATs themselves will no longer attempt to be all embracing, the quality of the teacher's own assessments of children's performance, made throughout the school year, will be of critical importance to the success of the whole endeavour.
TRENDS IN CURRICULUM AND ASSESSMENT
IN NEW SOUTH WALES' EDUCATION
ANY change, however strongly it has been demanded, however clearly it seems to be needed, creates argument and anxiety -- about its timing, its pace, its management, quite apart from the substantive matter of the change itself. New South Wales, in company with a number of comparable school systems, is undergoing significant changes in both of the areas on which this conference is focusing: curriculum and assessment. These changes are occurring within a comprehensive restructuring program for the school-education system as a whole.
I have confined this paper to an essentially factual outline of some of these changes. The first part looks at recommendations and restructuring proposals contained in three documents, all with significant implications for the curriculum; for teachers and for students; and for the processes by which the curriculum is designed, supported and implemented. The second part addresses the question of assessment by looking at one long-established public examination, the Higher School Certificate, and one very new example of uniform public testing, the Basic Skills Testing Program in primary schools.
CURRICULUM CHANGE IN NEW SOUTH WALES
As you will all be aware, the education system in New South Wales has been the subject of considerable scrutiny in recent years, and especially of late, with the publication of three major reports recommending major reforms.
The first report, The Schools Renewal Briefing Paper, better known as The Scott Report, concentrated on proposals for fundamental reform of structures, with a major devolution of responsibilities and authority to the regional, cluster, and school levels. Scott's review recommended that "a decentralized basis of organizational structure needs to be adopted, whereby decisions and actions take place as near to the school as possible, consistent with sound principles of educational administration."
Thus each school will gradually be required to manage its own budget, select its own staff and develop a Renewal Plan as the basis for its on-going program of school improvement and professional development. About the curriculum, Scott does not have a great deal to say. But the newly constituted Central Executive (of the Department of School Education) should retain a clear role in curriculum policy, the general overall direction (not execution) of Special Focus Programs and the education of disabled students (Special Education).
For the Carrick Committee, which produced the second major document in New South Wales last year, The Report of the Committee of Review of New South Wales Schools, curriculum issues were of particular significance. Carrick's second term of reference was to "examine ways of further improving the quality of education in NSW schools, bearing in mind the need for continuing public expenditure restraint; the principle of equality of opportunity; the concept of education for the whole of life as well as for vocational preparation; the aim of achieving the highest possible quality of education for all."
It is not possible to do justice to all the recommendations in Carrick, but the following were significant when the Reform Bill was drawn up at the end of 1989:
- support for the notion of Key Learning Areas;
- the establishment of a Board of Studies K-12;
- the need for curriculum continuity from K-12;
- emphasis on the importance of Early Childhood Education, and the recommendation for a further review of this area;
- the need for a common core curriculum and a rationalization of the primary curriculum.
The third major report, a White Paper entitled Excellence and Equity, grew out of a Green Paper issued late in 1988 as a basis for community and professional reaction. It contains 79 recommendations designed to bring about reforms which will:
- give a new focus and structure to study in schools, based upon Key Learning Areas;
- guarantee that every student through to Year 12 receives a balanced education with opportunities to develop technological and vocational skills within the context of a broad education for the whole of life;
- provide students with the knowledge and skills they will need to be active and creative citizens in the 21st Century, when we can expect Australia's future to be driven by high technology, rapid communication, higher levels of interaction in a dynamic international society, and an intensely competitive global economy;
- strengthen the core curriculum: "A strong foundation in the basic skills and in the Key Learning Areas is fundamental to providing equality of opportunity for every student."
The elements of the reform strategy designed to achieve the twin aims of equity and excellence include:
- a rigorous and balanced contemporary curriculum focused around a major core of essential learnings;
- fair, publicly credible systems of assessment, examination, certification, and credentialing which promote equity and excellence;
- regular testing of students' basic skills;
- stronger school discipline codes and more effective welfare policies in government schools;
- greater diversity and choice of schools for parents and students both within the government school system and between government and non-government schools;
- high quality leadership within government schools;
- major devolution of management responsibility for government schools to the local level;
- closer links with technical education and with commerce and industry;
- increased efficiency in education in the use of taxpayers' money.
Action taken since mid-1988 has meant that the various elements of the strategy have already been progressively introduced in schools and the system at large.
Other points of emphasis in Excellence and Equity include:
The need for greater curriculum guidance at the Primary level
A program to consolidate the primary curriculum around six Key Learning Areas is under way and the first of six syllabuses, Mathematics K-6, was released in 1989. The syllabus has a strong focus on content, giving an indication of when teachers might introduce various elements of the syllabus by offering advice on the scope and sequence of content across bands of schooling, Kindergarten-Year 2, Years 2-4, Years 4-6. Accompanying the syllabus are various resource materials and support documents, including a document called Introducing Mathematics K-6 to the Community which is designed to help principals, teachers and recently appointed Cluster Directors (replacing the former Inspectorate) communicate the intentions of the syllabus to the community at large.
New primary syllabuses with support materials are being developed for the six Key Learning Areas of English, science and technology (by 1990), human society and development (1991), and creative and practical arts (1992).
The Need for Secondary Curriculum Reform
Considerable concern is expressed about:
- the ability of schools to produce school leavers able to cope with the magnitude of the social, economic, and technological changes taking place in Australia;
- the need for our schools to reflect, in a balanced fashion, a concern for the development of the individual and the values and skills of both the world of work and the broader world;
- the importance of developing in students creativity, flexibility and pliability;
- the need to incorporate more extensively in the curriculum vocational and technological courses of a high standard, demonstrating a better balance between theoretical and applied studies;
- the need to educate for the whole of life as well as for vocation. The emphasis has to be on creative, flexible, motivated individuals with high self-esteem, community commitment, and strong moral values.
The White Paper strongly supports initiatives, begun in 1985, to offer Joint School/TAFE Courses and to expand Joint School/'TAFE Courses with Board-Determined Status (i.e. courses with prescribed Syllabuses and externally-set examinations). It acknowledges successful efforts to expand links with Business, begun in a concerted way in late 1987, through Schools-Industry Link Programs, School Visits-to-Industry Programs, and programs begun by Teachers in Business. There is now a vastly improved understanding of what schools are about and what business (broadly defined) hopes schools will be emphasizing with pupils.
Key Learning Areas
The concept of Key Learning Areas, first addressed in the New South Wales Department of Education's 1987 document The Primary Purpose, was strongly supported by teachers and parents in their responses to the Green Discussion Paper. Confirmation is given in the White Paper for the six Key Learning Areas for primary schools, leading to eight in the secondary area. In Years K-10 students will engage in substantial study of all the following areas:
| PRIMARY | SECONDARY |
| English | English |
| Mathematics | Mathematics |
| Science and Technology | Science
Technological and Applied Studies |
Human Society and the Environment (including
Modern Languages) | Human Society and its Environment
Modern and Classical Languages |
| Creative and Practical Arts | Creative Arts |
Personal Development, Health
and Physical Education | Personal Development, Health
and Physical Education |
For Years 11 and 12, in the Bill now being debated, students will be required to study at least two other Key Learning Areas.
Curriculum Planning K-12
The White Paper reports that frustration has been caused to parents, students and teachers by the lack of continuity between primary and secondary schooling. The establishment of a Board of Studies to cover K-12 is seen as a key way of addressing this critical problem. Additionally, the White Paper points out that "all Syllabuses will be developed with a K-12 perspective". As well, the grouping of primary and secondary schools into clusters under the leadership of Cluster Directors, as part of Scott's Schools Renewal Plan, will assist all schools within a cluster to consider the curriculum from a K-12 perspective. The solutions I have described illustrate how proposals in the various Reports interact.
Defining the Curriculum
In New South Wales we shall continue to see detailed Syllabuses and related support documents, prepared centrally for implementation in schools. There will be strong curriculum guidelines but not undue prescription. A balance will be sought to enable schools to determine how they can offer a Core across and within Key Learning Areas while providing opportunities for more able students to progress more rapidly and for the less able to be given more opportunity to succeed in school. A major change will be the move away from the definition of curriculum requirements in terms of minimum time allocation.
This new focus on objectives and outcomes will require a substantial revision of all secondary syllabuses. 1990 will see new structures and curriculum initiatives coming into place in New South Wales. Our task will be to apply our minds to the curriculum changes we shall be required to implement and to determine how best to introduce these changes within a new set of management structures operating at all levels of the system.
A BROADER PERSPECTIVE FOR NEW SOUTH WALES CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT
In describing the directions being set for education in New South Wales I have referred to a range of comprehensive Reviews and Reports, all commissioned by a Government which came to office in March 1988. The Reports demonstrate how Governments whose authority derives from the political process are seeking advice from an increasingly wide variety of sources -- not just from their own Departments -- as they set policies and priorities in a period of rapid change.
Everyone has a view about what is or should be happening in schools. Politicians, employers, business leaders, the public at large all make judgements and, not surprisingly, arrive at a variety of conclusions as to what should make up "the curriculum" and what constitutes "quality education". It is a tribute to professional educators that education has become such a public issue. Now, the responsibility of the education professionals must be to maintain this level of community interest in education and make the debate as well informed as it can be. Only in that way will we allay community confusion, and even suspicion, about what goes on in schools and why, and guarantee the greatest value to education from the widening community concern.
In many education systems we are seeing a "recentralisation of curriculum decision-making". In New South Wales the need for clear central policy development and co-ordination of the curriculum has been seen as essential. Also recognised has been the importance of regions and individual schools evaluating their own programs, implementing renewal programs based on clearly specified syllabuses, and purchasing, sharing and applying resources as they see fit. What should result is a better balance between clear central direction and local initiative.
Schools and Quality: An International Report (1988) draws attention to the move in many countries towards a more careful balance between centrally negotiated guidelines and school-based planning for curriculum implementation. The aim is to provide schools with more explicit information about the content of the curriculum, the values underpinning it, and outcomes to be achieved by students. This change has resulted from the difficulties that teachers have had in coping with the workload imposed by the development of new, detailed school programs. School-based curriculum development is very time-consuming and difficult -- and it can hinder the task of teaching. What has emerged in New South Wales is a call for more detail in the form of specific, readily implemented ideas, and for more detailed practical support for the development of school-based curriculum policies.
DIRECTION FOR THE CURRICULUM IN THE 1990s
From our current efforts in New South Wales we expect syllabuses and support documents able to be more readily implemented by teachers and more readily understood by the community.
In New South Wales, the new syllabuses of the 1990s are not just the very old syllabuses in full colour. There will be no mindless return to "sixpenny syllabuses" which merely listed topics which examiners could represent in the form of tricky questions, but rather the development of syllabuses which give teachers straightforward, practical guidance about what to teach and why, and how they might teach it.
Instead of being inventories of examinable topics, the new course descriptions focus on what schools should be achieving. They emphasise scope and sequence, across-curricular perspectives, program directions for minority group students and students with learning difficulties, the connection between curriculum and assessment, and links between school and community. Thus the syllabuses reclaim the best of the old, pre-1965 period and retain the best of the middle period (1965-88).
Careful statements of aims and objectives will be coupled in the new syllabuses with practical advice on content logically connected to the aims and objectives so that teachers can work through the content without needing to nudge and wink at the aims. There will be practical advice on programming without a return to mindless prescription that all students at age "x" must know topics "p" and "q", an approach which flew in the face of what we know about child development. Indeed syllabuses will contain careful statements about scope and sequence related to recognisable, broad stages of child development.
In short, we are aiming for a realistic combination of practical advice and prescription, which leaves teachers with sufficient room to exercise having to construct their whole teaching program from scratch. And, most importantly, the whole lot is being written in terms which all teachers can work from and reasonable members of an interested community can understand and value.
CURRICULUM AND ASSESSMENT
Schools and Quality highlights a problem frequently referred to in literature on curriculum: the lack of clear links between curriculum planning and evaluation. Associated with this problem is the issue of student assessment by teachers. The general view put is that inadequate steps are now taken to ensure that particular curriculum goals are being achieved by students and to determine what additional help should be given to individual pupils. The report points out that the diagnostic role of the teacher in curriculum planning is all too often neglected.
The issue of teacher ability to carry out student assessment using a variety of processes is clearly one we need to address. Without efforts to determine whether curriculum goals are appropriate, whether students are achieving goals adequately, and how to help those not being successful, we cannot guarantee quality in the curriculum. As we seek to assist teachers to handle more successfully goal-setting and student assessment, we need to address the question of how teachers can resist the temptation to allow the curriculum to be dictated by the external examinations, and to measure quality -- as too often the public does -- only in terms of success in such examinations.
The search for more precise information about schools and about student achievement has led to a call for more objective information to be made available at key stages in the schooling process. Parallel with attempts to define what constitutes the "core curriculum" has been the move to assess how well students are performing in "the core", or what is popularly termed "the basics". In Australia, we recognise the need to demonstrate achievements and hence respond to the debate on "standards" by seeking to gather concrete data on student performance at key stages of schooling; though we do not practice nation-wide testing.
Each of our education systems has long had some published measures of student performance in secondary schools and now we are seeing moves to include either whole groups or samples of students at other stages in their schooling. The aim of such testing programs is not just to give overall measures of performance on particular aspects of the curriculum (usually literacy and numeracy) but, very importantly, to give schools and parents advice on how well students are doing and what might be done to assist those who are not performing well. Tests are seen as one -- and only one -- part of the assessment process.
Let me stress at the outset that, as more testing takes place, it will be important to give schools and teachers considerable help in interpreting results and in combining the results of such testing with their own school or class-based assessment data. Equally, parents need information in terms they can understand about the purpose of any new testing programs, as well as about the performance of their children. Throughout, it will be important for teachers to understand that they still need to devise comprehensive programs of assessment to be linked with their own curriculum objectives, and to the needs of their individual students, so that externally set tests do not dominate their teaching.
PUBLIC ASSESSMENT IN NEW SOUTH WALES
While other States and systems have made frequent, major changes in the public assessment of school leavers, New South Wales has been remarkably stable. When the Wyndham Report was phased in from 1962, the School Certificate was established for Year 10, 1965, and the first Higher School Certificate was sat in 1967. While the School Certificate has ceased to be a fully external examination, the practice of an external HSC at the end of Year 12 has never been abandoned. In primary schools there had been no recent public testing program until last year, when the Basic Skills Testing Program was introduced for Year 6 and a sample of Year 3 students.
Arguments rage about the merits of public, wide-scale testing, and no issue so clearly illustrates the burden of responsibility imposed by the community on its professional educators. It seems to me that the right kind of examination in the right time and place has an excellent chance of being thought "a good thing" by the community, and properly so. However, if educational authorities make even one serious miscalculation when choosing and administering public examinations or tests, community unrest is likely to be loudly voiced. I am sure that every one from an education system could point to assessment procedures which could have been better handled. Let's not kid ourselves -- assessment is a very sensitive area and one in which it is very difficult to disentangle the objective merits of the assessment procedure from how it is promoted and reported.
The Higher School Certificate
To be eligible for the award of an HSC a student must have followed a program of study involving a minimum of either:
- Eleven Units of Study, including two Units of English, in each of Years 11 and 12, comprising a minimum of five courses in Year 11 and four courses in Year 12; or
- Eleven Units covering subjects including two Units of English, through a one-year TAFE intensive course.
Candidates may undertake a combination of Board-determined Courses and Board-approved Courses to make up the 11 required units in both Years 11 and 12. However, at least five of these units must be Board-determined Courses in both Years 11 and 12.
The Higher School Certificate consists of an external examination and an assessment component. Towards the end of Year 12 schools provide an assessment mark, which is a measure of each student's performance throughout each course, based on set assessment tasks. Guidelines have been developed by Syllabus Committees to assist teachers to devise appropriate assessment tasks. Assessments are designed to measure achievements in a wider range of syllabus objectives than can be measured in an examination.
Each school grouping pattern of marks in each course in the external examination forms a spread, which is used to adjust the assessment marks awarded by the school to each student so that they have the same mean and standard deviation as the group's examination marks. Through this process of moderation it is possible to ensure that a student's assessment mark in any Board-determined Course can be fairly compared with assessment marks for the same Course gained by students at other schools in the State. In this moderation process, the rank order of students in the group and the relative differences between the assessments as determined by the school are retained.
A Tertiary Entrance Score (TES) is calculated on the best 10 Units of Board-determined Courses. For each Course the scaled examination mark and the moderated assessment are combined and scaled. These calculations are undertaken by the University of Sydney, using a process which takes into account the quality of the candidature in each Course.
The community regards the HSC as a rite of passage and expects two major things from it, rightly or wrongly: it must find out whether students have gained what they should from 12 or 13 years of sustained schooling, so it must be demanding; and it must sort out students as they complete one stage of their lives and begin the next, so results must be given in simple, all-embracing codes, such as numbers or grades, to facilitate selection and sorting.
The community does not expect the HSC to alert them to their students' learning difficulties -- it is considered too late for that -- so there is no expectation that the results should be diagnostic or formative. Members of the community, particularly prospective employers, seem not much interested, either, in verbal descriptions of students' achievements, in profiles of performance, or indeed in any form of assessment which leaves them to work out for themselves where students stand in the population or whether they have met various selection requirements.
It is my view that in New South Wales they would be very reluctant to transform the HSC into a personal profile or a set of verbal assessments describing the work produced by the student while at school, and our main concern would not be the difficulties of having all teachers prepare such assessments to the common and high standard required. It is, rather, that most audiences have no frame of reference in their heads that would enable them to interpret such assessments. It would be difficult enough for an experienced teacher to read an account of the tasks completed by a student during Year 12, and to evaluate them. It would be impossible, I believe, for lay audiences to do so.
The argument against using global marks or grades to report achievements is that they camouflage a student's relative strengths and weaknesses, and deny the audience access to the more detailed information which they might need for their own particular purposes. Their experience is that the audience demand for this level of detail in HSC results is very weak in comparison with the demand for global marks which facilitate selection and sorting. When the Statutory Board ceased calculating the aggregate HSC mark a few year ago, the universities moved quickly to reinstate it. In general, they have not been taken to task by the community for so doing.
It is true that an HSC result says very little about students' personal qualities or their ability to perform outside the examination room. These considerations are important. I believe that the answer is not to scrap the HSC, but to provide an additional credential which can acknowledge these qualities and pay due regard to the widening range of courses and programs of study undertaken by a more varied candidature. Already, all students completing Year 12 are provided with an HSC Portfolio which contains their Year 11 and Year 12 Record of Achievement, and they can add comprehensive statements, such as interim school reports and references, which provide information on a variety of dimensions.
The Basic Skills Testing Program
The first tests of the new Basic Skills Testing Program in New South Wales Primary Schools took place in August 1989 for all Year 6 students and a sample of Year 3 students. As the tests have created considerable interest, I intend to give a fair bit of detail about them. Aware of the limitations of a test whose scale of candidature (just under 60,000 students in Year 6) would demand machine marking, we defined the tests in the Program as Aspects of Literacy (Reading, Language) and Aspects of Numerxacy (Number, Measurement, Space).
The most important thing to say about the Basic Skills Testing Program is that it is not a primary school version of the HSC in its purpose, its timing, or its scope. It has been designed to give schools and parents specific, detailed and individual information about children's achievement; and thus to give primary schools one more piece of information with which to evaluate and develop their programs of study. A reporting system for parents describing the skills demonstrated by their children has been developed. The only results published are those relating to the Statewide population and to significant sub-groups: boys/ girls, age groups, NESB, Aboriginality. This has removed the fear that individual schools would have their results unfairly compared, especially in the media.
The method of analysing the students' responses used by ACER (who have the contract for the first two years of the program) make it possible to identify four skill bands in each of the five Aspects tests. Students were placed in one of these skill bands for each Aspect according to the questions they were able to answer. The report which parents received indicated which band their child was in for each of the five Aspects, and briefly described the questions they were able to answer.
They also developed for each school an extensive package of confidential reports about its performance. One of these reports enabled schools to compare their own performance against the rest of the State question by question. Another gave a profile of the answer of each individual student set out in such a way as to highlight any unusual features of the student's overall pattern of answers, thus providing teachers with clues as to which students needed further diagnostic analysis and/or specially adapted teaching programs.
A common complaint about formal tests for primary school children is that those who do badly are perceived by themselves, their teachers, and others to be inherent failures, and that this label acts thereafter as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. They countered this in several ways:
- They reported what each student could do, not what they could not do. Because each parent's report listed the skills that were associated with each of the skill bands, it was a simple matter for parents of students in a lower band to note the higher band skills which their children had not yet mastered, but they did not highlight them and they did not use the terms pass and fail.
- They emphasized that the results reported only what students could do so far to stress the non-terminal nature of this program (in contrast with the HSC) and to acknowledge the potential of all students to keep acquiring additional skills. This was extremely important for non-English speaking background students and others who, for special reasons, might not yet be achieving at a level commensurate with their abilities.
- They stressed to schools that they were not to use the Basic Skills Testing Program results alone as a basis for assigning students to special classes or programs. Unlike HSC results, these results play no role in selecting or sorting students for further studies. At all stages in the program and in all of the literature they provided in Information Bulletins and Staff Development Modules they stressed the need for teachers to add their assessment results to the outcomes of the BSTP and provide parents with a comprehensive picture of the achievements of their children.
Teachers were worried that the tests would narrow and trivialize the curriculum. They confronted this worry in several ways, all calculated to discourage the community from thinking of the Basic Skills Testing Program as a Primary Schools HSC.
- They described the tests as part of a normal school day, conducted in students' normal classrooms supervised by their normal classroom teachers. They imposed no more administrative constraints than were necessary to secure reasonable standardization of conditions from school to school.
- They took every opportunity to stress that the results would comprise just one more component of the total pool of assessment information teachers collect and summarize when they report to parents, and that the main responsibility for assessing and reporting the achievements of primary students remains with the school. They encouraged schools to present their children's Basic Skills Testing Program results to parents during the procedure in which they present their normal, end-of-year reports.
- They ensured that the tests featured all parts of the relevant curricula. In Numeracy, for example, they gave equal emphasis to the three strands of the new Mathematics Syllabus: number, measurement and space. They did this in both the tests themselves and the reports. Each Year 6 student received a separate result for each strand. Far from narrowing the curriculum in mathematics, the Basic Skills Testing Program can encourage all teachers to incorporate the measurement and space strands into their teaching programs more quickly and seriously.
- They designed test questions that would reinforce good teaching practice, get away from the artificial and mechanical text book exercises which characterized the standardized tests of the past, and let students demonstrate their skills in handling real-life literacy and numeracy problems.
My account of their efforts to meet both the expectations and the concerns of students, parents, schools and the community must of course recognize additional matters they still need to resolve.
If a major purpose of the tests is diagnostic, then Year 6 students need to be tested earlier than August. In 1990 the Year 6 Tests will be in June, and it is likely that even earlier date will be set for 1991.
Groups representing the interests of Aboriginal students and students of non-English speaking background are, quite understandably, fearful of the impact on their communities should the results be misused. They are also concerned that the tests could have a cultural bias that would prevent their students from having their skills properly acknowledged. While they have no intention of setting tests that do not assume standard English as the literacy norm, they are equally determined to introduce no avoidable bias in the tests. These groups will be more closely involved in the test design in the future.
They are also exploring how to present information to schools so that their needs of understanding and interpreting are well met.
Despite all the complaints which were made and all the fears raised prior to the tests in August last year, I am certain that most of their teachers were pleasantly surprised by the tests. They know that reaction from the community was quite favourable. The tests impose few administrative burdens on teachers, are extremely supportive of good teaching practices, and provide useful comparative assessment information that comes with a strong guarantee of confidentiality and of system-wide comparability. And in New South Wales schools, as a result of the Basic Skills Testing Program, there has been lively discussion of all aspects of assessment and how to report to parents.
CONCLUSION
My paper will have demonstrated that there is plenty of educational activity in New South Wales. They are living in interesting times as their structures change, the curriculum is reformed and new programs of assessment are introduced.
As I said at the outset, not everyone finds change comfortable, and some of their teachers (and administrators) may well be hoping that it will all go away and that things will "get back to normal" before too long. I believe that they are experiencing constant change -- that constant change is the new norm, and one to which all of those involved in education need to adjust. I have described some of the solutions they have been devising, and I look forward to hearing your reactions.
TRENDS IN VICTORIAN EDUCATION
SINCE many of the readers are not from Victoria, I should give you a quick sketch of the state's system as it is now.
Virtually all the young people of Victoria between the ages of five and 15 are in school. The vast majority stay in education into the post-compulsory years -- Years 11 (84 per cent) and 12 (57 per cent). If equivalent TAFE courses are added to school figures, then overall participation in education at Year 12 is 65 per cent.
HIGHEST PARTICIPATION RATES OF ANY STATE
Victoria has far the highest participation of 15-19 year-olds in school of any State in Australia, and by far the highest proportion of Year 12 students going straight on to higher education: 50 per cent compared with 40 per cent in NSW, which is the next highest. The other 50 per cent goes into the vocational training system or into work.
These figures for retention in make a different pattern from the two systems we have heard about so far: England and NSW. In NSW between Year 10 and Year 11 there is a large transfer of students to TAFE or to work. Only 66 per cent of students stay on at school in Year 11. There is a corresponding difference in Year 12 retention. The pattern in England is similar. Year 12 retention in has dropped sharply, and transfer to vocational education is substantial.
The difference in the pattern of post-compulsory provision helps to explain why the reform of the curriculum in the upper secondary school has been such a large item on Victoria's agenda during the past decade. Victoria is developing in directions that are comparable to those of some European countries, such as France and Sweden. Both academic and technical education are being drawn together in comprehensive senior secondary district schools of more general scope.
Students in Victoria are to be found in one of three school sectors: a government sector, a Catholic one, and an independent schools sector. The largest of these is the government sector. This serves 67 per cent of all students, and 62 per cent of the Year 12 cohort.
For most of their existence (and the situation came to an end only this year) government secondary schools have been divided into High Schools and Technical Schools. Historically, technical schools were the result of a failure of nerve by government to challenge the monopoly of private schools over general academic education. It was decided that the best education for the majority of working people would be practical and vocational rather than academic and general. This notion in fact survives today in the social statistics of student participation in school and higher education. What and where young people study is closely connected to their socio-economic status.
Of course, you can reverse this proposition about workers and say that the academically suitable students will generally come from selective schools of high social status. This is the proposition contained in Professor Penington's assertion that any selection conducted by the University of Melbourne would of necessity and inevitably favour students from private schools at the expense of students from working class schools, which he identifies as government schools in the Western suburbs. These same Western suburbs, by the way, have the highest student retention rates in the state school system, so the exclusion would be on a grand scale.
The next largest sector is the Catholic school sector, which caters for 23 per cent of the total school population and 21 per cent of the Year 12 cohort. The Catholic system is at least as socially diverse as the government school system and it aims to provide comprehensively for both primary and secondary age students.
The smallest sector is made up of independent schools which account for 10 per cent of total enrolments and 17 per cent of Year 12 enrolments. They are a mixture of school types ranging from well-known old public schools, such as Melbourne Grammar, Scotch and Wesley, to lesser grammar schools, privately owned coaching colleges, and church and ethnic schools.
GROWING CONVICTION IN BENEFIT OF COMMON SCHOOLING
In spite of the social inequities that persist in education, there is a widespread and growing conviction in Victoria that all young people can benefit from a comprehensive and common schooling through to Year 12. My interest now is in refining the ways that can be done. This requires a strengthening of both the primary and secondary curriculum and certificate. At the moment, this certificate is in transition, and contains the remnants of divided certificates and alternative certificates as well as elements of the new certificate. But the period of having a mainstream certificate and a profusion of alternatives is now over. The experience gained from the '70s is now going into the creation of a single certificate covering Years 11 & 12. This certificate, the VCE, will be phased in over this year and the next two years.
As a consequence of these changes, we will also have to reorganize secondary schools, both to merge the high and technical school traditions and to expand the size of schools at the post-compulsory level. This reorganization is probably the major change secondary schools will have to deal with over the next few years.
* * *
I intend to discuss four trends: accountability, demand, curriculum and assessment. These are trends which apply widely to school systems throughout Australia and in countries comparable to Australia.
Accountability is closely related to questions of control. Public education in Victoria has shifted over the years from being publicly-funded but under departmental control to having a very significant degree of control by the users of the system. Both England and New South Wales have recently had Education Reform Bills. These reforms envisage a greater degree of control by school councils or boards over the program and management of individual schools. Victoria had its reform act eight years ago when it amended the Education Act and published a set of Ministerial Papers which gave to School Councils the authority to determine school policy within general guidelines set by government.
This puts an obligation on school councils to answer to their communities: to present a program and report on it. As school councils develop (which is not a rapid process) this will become the primary form of accountability in the system. At the system level, it is then necessary to monitor the observance of public guidelines and goals and the performance of schools, as well as to support schools to plan improvements. Except at the post-compulsory level, Victoria does not engage in the sort of mass pupil testing I have heard about from New South Wales and England and which I often hear about from the United States.
Schools are in a much better position to monitor and report on the performance of individual students, and instruments such as profiles and standardized tests can be used by them to compare their performances with other schools. Trends in the system are monitored both by census and by samples. The Victorian State Board of Education is currently working on ways to have groups of schools monitor and report on their performance: on the retention of students, on the school's curriculum provision, on the access participation and achievement of specified groups in the curriculum.
This sort of devolution of control is not easy. It makes systems and power groups nervous. This nervousness may account for the apparent contradiction of systems' devolving authority but increasing their checking mechanisms. In my view the trend to greater school autonomy will sooner or later win out. As parents learn more and more about education -- indeed are themselves better educated -- they will play a much larger role in controlling schools and setting policies. They are not going to accept remote or simplistic forms of accountability that do not change what happens to their children. Systems will have to adapt their monitoring to that reality.
IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PARTICIPATION GAINED GROUND IN 1960s
The demand for schooling has now transformed itself into a trend towards universal schooling. This is a trend that goes back a long way in Victorian education. The educational preoccupation of the 20th century has been with the provision of secondary education for the common people.
The first moves were made early in the century by the Department's Director, Frank Tate. He wanted secondary, technical, and university education for all, but this did not happen. Whatever hopes working people might have had for greater educational opportunities had to wait for two world wars and a depression to pass.
The next major moves came in the 1950s and 1960s when department officials expanded secondary schools irrespective of the facilities available to house students and staff. Political parties and, by and large, the teachers unions stupported this growth. High school pupils were streamed into three tracks: academic, with huge failure rates; commerce-domestic, for girls; and manual and trades, for boys.
In the 1960s the ideal of universal participation in the secondary phase of education was expressed by a notable Departmental officer, Ron Reed, and also by teachers, and it had continuing, effectively bipartisan political backing. Even so, it took the better part of 20 years for the ideal to gain substance. By the beginning of the 1970s, technical schools had become more general and academic, and the first four years of high school offered a general education for all students. Many schools, however, maintained higher and lower streams within the general course. With only about a quarter persisting to Year 12, the post-compulsory sector was powerfully streamed, with a minority going on to higher education and the remainder going into TAFE training or directly to work.
It must be understood that the ever-increasing demand was for general education rather than specifically vocational training. This is what students sought and authorities encouraged. By the '80s, even in the training area -- in apprenticeships for example -- the educational level of applicants was rising to Year 12. It was better to be good at English and Mathematics than to start out early in life to be a plumber. So employers thought; and according to the most recent surveys of the employers' education consortium, they still think it.
The first response aimed at increasing retention rates in school, and in school certificates around the country, was to create alternative general courses. This is still the pattern of demand from students, parents, and employers. With almost two out of three students staying on to Year 12, the studies most in demand and most highly rated by students and employers are English (which is compulsory), mathematics, science and business. This has led to a decline in the humanities, especially languages, literature and history, and to an undervaluing of both the arts and technology. These studies will have to be installed firmly in the compulsory phase -- as NSW and England are aiming to do with their prescribed curricula, reorganizing the provision of the senior school so that each district can offer substantial programs across the areas of the arts, business, humanities, science and technology.
CONSERVATIVE RESISTANCE
The most often-published resistance at the moment is conservative -- in the dull and unyielding sense of that word. It advocates a return to the 1960s, when there was a clear-cut division of the school population at Year 10 into those destined for higher education and those who were not, with some "alternative" arrangements for those who were not yet sure of their role in society. As I have heard, Professor Penington has advocated organizing schools into three categories of students (higher education, work or trade, or don't know) according to the patterns of 20 years ago.
Taken literally, his categories would put the great majority in the higher education group, which I think he would not intend. His is a very eccentric view. It shows a complete disregard both for history and for current circumstances. Specific training for work on the basis of a Year 10 qualification is fading out. Virtually anyone with a stake in education or training -- governments, employers, educators -- now accepts that young people should if possible have a broad education to Year 12 standard. Employers seek people who have had a preparation similar to those aiming at higher education -- people with a good grounding in English and mathematics, who have shown what they can do in some broadly specialized field such as arts, business, humanities, science or technology, and who have developed through their studies positive and flexible attitudes to work.
Outside of a handful of conservative critics, the most vocal of whom are virtually all here today, there is no articulate group in Australia who would ask for anything different from what I have outlined above. The question is not what to do -- the Blackburn Report laid that out five years ago for Victoria. The question is how to do it.
Basically, schools have accepted that the general level of education of the people can be raised. In Victoria, at least, they have passed beyond the phase of offering alternatives and easy options. They are in fact following, not the Penington view, which divides and narrows the curriculum to book or bench, but something much more like the Greg Sheridan view, which is not far from Antonio Gramsci's classic view or for that matter the Blackburn view that all young people should have access to the "best validated knowledge of our culture."
We know that young people perform differently when teachers, parents and schools expect a lot from them. The more parents influence the policies of the school, the more the school will be expected to be excellent; and the better the planning within the school, the more thorough the collaboration with families, the higher the standard will be.
A more effective pedagogy, emphasizing the skills of English language and mathematics, has to spread, especially in secondary school. In essence, the task is to teach a substantially common curriculum in normal, unstreamed classes, building on positive attitudes to work and on experience in problem-solving and taking responsibility. This is a pedagogy which focuses on clearly stated outcomes and permits work to be flexible in its detail but directed towards substantially common outcomes.
The outcomes expected in the new national curriculum in England are a ready-to-hand example of what 1 would call a substantially common curriculum -- one which gives all students continuous and rigorous studies in the main subject areas of English, mathematics, science, technology, history, geography, languages, the arts, health and physical education. Victoria still has some way to go to achieve this, especially in technology and the arts, but they are undoubtedly working towards it, which is something that could not have been said up until the middle of the 1980s.
Here, as in Western Europe, the post-compulsory years are now being treated as foundation years for subsequent vocational specialization. This is not a trend unique to Victoria. In Victoria's version, every student's program is divided between studies maintaining breadth across the classic grouping of humanities and science and specialized studies in the broadly defined areas of arts, business, humanities, science and technology.
FIVE-POINT SCALE WIDESPREAD
In the matter of assessment the trend is clear and inevitable, as the instruments used both in England and New South Wales show. Victoria has so far developed profiles with seven bands for reading and writing. More are to follow in other studies. This is part of a move towards the explicit statement of criteria by which progress and performance can be assessed. In plain terms, it is the difference between saying "so-and-so is able to this, and hence is at this level" and "so-and-so is better (or worse) than her neighbour." This seems a simple difference, perhaps, but it makes a very great difference to what the learner, the parent and the teacher understand about progress in learning. Where degrees of performance at comparable levels are being assessed, the use of explicit criteria for assessment enables teachers to use a range of assessment methods and to report either descriptively or on a scale. The most usual scale is a five-point one.
Although five-point assessment is already widespread and seems certain to expand, it is currently being attacked here in Victoria as an inadequate basis for selection into parts of the university system. Selection into universities, according to Professor Penington and others, cannot be done on the basis of five-point gradings on common tasks even if the gradings are based on published descriptive criteria.
The virtue of five, or four or seven point scales -- indeed any with relatively few points -- is that the meaning of each grade can be described reasonably in English, by recourse to words such as "excellent", "outstanding", "well", "weak", and "satisfactory", and intensifiers such as "very" or "highly". Or if they think the resources of the English language are too meagre, they can ask for a rating on a scale of say, 10, and expect that there will be a defensible difference between a grading of eight and a grading of nine. But once they climb into higher numbers they are entering mumbo-jumbo land.
Currently they are asked to believe that a candidate awarded 281 by a computer, whose program is probably understood only by itself and its designer, can be reliably distinguished from a candidate with 282. They know perfectly well that if they put the same candidates through the same tests and their results through the same computer, they would get different figures. Assessments do not become objective once they are expressed in numbers. In discussing "finer scales" the recent report by Barry McGaw and others warns of "the risk of creating only artificial distinctions between students for whom there is actually no measurable difference in performance." That is a very good point. Different numbers may represent no difference whatever in competence or performance. People in education should be concerned with how defensible their figures are.
The fix that Victoria has got into at the moment is that the demand for more statistical mumbo-jumbo for some parts of the university selection process is being taken by large sections of the community as a judgment on assessment practices. The leader writer of the Sunday Sun, for example, claims that the A-E grading system aims "to make all students equal, thus abolishing a practice which makes achievers more equal than others." Hundreds of thousands of potential readers, if they are as dumb as this leader writer, will believe that reporting on a five-point letter scale is something new and sinister and a threat to national survival. In fact, universities have used a five-point scale for years.
There is not much sense in the current debate about assessment. Improved and rational methods of assessment, from which people will be able to understand actual levels of achievement, are spreading. They should be thankful for that, and for the fact that they should be able to achieve universal schooling by the end of the century. All being well, all young people should gain at least some of the intellectual and cultural benefits that most of the readers of this paper have enjoyed.
FORCES FOR CHANGE AND THE V.C.E.
AUSTRALIA is amidst major change in many aspects of its society. This change is driven by both economic and social forces, and education is inevitably part of this process of change. In view of education's central role in preparing young people for new roles, its institutions cannot stand aside and ignore change. Australia's universities have traditionally led the development of our professions, our industries and our cultural development. Our schools are the environment in which young people themselves are prepared for a changing future.
Education is, of course, about individuals. But if individuals are to be prepared for a changing future, education must also consider national needs and international practises. European nations such as France and Germany are placing increasing emphasis on education, educational standards, and scientific research. Countries like Japan with few natural resources have raced far ahead of us. Other countries in our region, which we have been prone to disregard as newly developing nations, have made a far greater investment than we in education and in research.
Either we make a real commitment to develop our intellectual potential through education and research, or we face an ongoing decline in our living standards over the next 50 years. That decline will inevitably increase social tension and reduce our capacity to care for the less fortunate sectors of our community. Our "post-industrial" society, characterized by the computing and information technology revolution, offers enormous opportunities to restructure industries and services. Education should lead in exploring these issues.
In schooling, the development of mathematical skills, knowledge of foreign languages, and understanding of other cultures as well as our own are all imperatives in responding to essential change -- and certainly to the demand that we maintain our high standard of living. Many have argued that an increased retention rate in the senior years of school is equally essential. According to the Blackburn Report, successful schooling to the end of Year 12 is "a key factor in more socially equal post-school opportunities."
A large influence on the increase in retention which has already occurred has been the removal of the unemployment benefit for teenagers, but there has also been a welcome change in attitude amongst young people towards the value of schooling. The varied population of students must all be catered for. However, those subjects designed to interest or entertain students who have no serious ambition to learn should not be said to be the same as those which are central to preparing people for higher education.
EDUCATIONAL IDEOLOGY AS AN AGENT OF CHANGE
"Progressive Education" is a philosophy with a long history, traced by most to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Its aim has always been to educate and develop each individual student. This is a commendable principle, but linked with it has been a great emphasis on the rights of students to study whatever interests them, and little emphasis on the assessment, particularly external assessment, of educational achievement. For many progressive educationists, common curricula, the external monitoring of standards, and emphasis on content rather than process are all anathema.
Corollaries of a radical move to "progressive education" are far more autonomy and independence for individual teachers and a reduction in requirements to meet externally set standards or to teach externally prescribed content in subjects which students might find difficult. A further attraction of changes of this kind is that, apart from possible assessment of student satisfaction, there is little opportunity to evaluate the quality of teaching.
Early discussions of the Blackburn Report bore many of the hallmarks of a strong push in the direction of "progressive education" in this extreme form. The first proposals for "study outlines" for many fields of study were extraordinarily loose, even vacuous, leaving individual schools to define the details. The long conflict about grading Common Assessments Tasks (CATs) on the simple A to E scale also reflects a preoccupation with minimizing recognition of achievement and hence the possibility of competition between students or between schools on the basis of such achievement. Over the past three years much progress has been made in defining content more clearly, but in some studies, schools are still given an extraordinarily wide brief. Even now, VCAB only requires that Year 11 studies be assessed as "Satisfactorily" or "Unsatisfactorily" completed rather than indicating the quality of achievement.
For some time, moves towards "progressive education" have been buttressed by theories of social equity. As an ideal, equity in the provision of education is beyond reproach. But whilst equity in terms of opportunity has one ring, "equality of outcomes" has an entirely different one. "Equal outcomes" was a catch-cry of persons associated with the Teachers' Federation of Victoria during the early 1980s. It was an article of faith that rewards for high academic achievement and any sort of competition in education were "undemocratic". Strong elements of this thinking lay behind the early stage of the new Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE).
The preoccupation with equity led to the basic and immutable decision that a single certificate and set of studies would serve the needs of all students in Years 11 and 12, regardless of whether or not they were likely to go on to further education. The Group 1/ Group 2 distinction, and the division between HSC and STC courses, were seen as imposing arbitrary social divisions. There is now a single study of English for all students. The result is that students with disparate potential and needs are all said to have undertaken the same study and to have been assessed by the same criteria, often applied to widely varying content and tasks.
THE PRINCIPLES OF EDUCATION WHICH MATTER MOST
I have identified five major educational principles. Whilst they overlap in certain respects, each has implications for the current period of change. In many ways they share beliefs and values with the "progressive" educational philosophy which I have already discussed. But there are important differences.
We must give every individual the opportunity to develop to their full potential
Development for each individual must maximize his or her intellectual capacity, social skills, physical and moral development. Development of this potential is important for every young person in this State regardless of their social, economic or cultural background. If young people are denied the opportunity to develop to the full, not only are they the losers but so is our community as a whole.
Education must recognize that different students have differing talents.
This principle is a corollary of the first, of maximizing the potential of every individual. The students in Years 11 and 12 can be divided into 3 groups:
- Those who do not intend to pursue further study but intend to seek an immediate place in the workforce, perhaps associated with some technical training;
- Those committed to prepare for higher education who need studies in Years 11 and 12 which will prepare them for this future (some 50 per cent of Victorian Year 12 students); and
- Those uncertain as to which of the first two courses they have the interest or the potential to follow.
The third group is important, since we should leave choice and opportunities open wherever possible. However, the needs of the first and the second group differ greatly. On current evidence in Victoria, nearly 50 per cent of those leaving Year 12 will go either directly into employment or to employment through further technical training. They may well not need specific academic preparation for higher education. For them, English might, for instance, legitimately concentrate on the writing of job applications, the interpretation of advertisements, and the discussion of television programs or films (which are all optional tasks within the English field of study).
Bill Hannan, Chairman of the State Education Board, vigorously criticized the proposition that there were students in these three categories. In a recent public debate on the VCE he attacked my views, presumably on the grounds "that all students are equal" and that, accordingly, all should be regarded as the same and should receive the same education. It is worthy to note that some 10 years ago, when he was an official of the Victorian Teachers' Federation, Bill Hannan advocated selection into universities on the basis of ballot rather than on the basis of educational achievement. For Hannan, changing both education and selection into universities has long been seen as the means of changing the structure of sbciety.
This obsession with social equity is a perfect illustration of the leap in logic from "all people are equal" to "all activities are equal." In 1960, at the time of the move to comprehensive schools in the United Kingdom, C.S. Lewis attributed this leap to a subconscious philosophy of "I'm as good as you are." In his essay "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," he wrote, "The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic'. These differences between pupils -- for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences -- must be disguised."
It is unfashionable these days to speak in the unadorned and direct language of "dunces and idlers." Yet some people have more aptitude than others, some people work harder than others, and some, inevitably, have more opportunity than others. We must not use a desire to promote equity as an excuse to ignore differences between students. Flabby education aimed at the lowest common denominator does not remove inequities; it merely conceals them.
We must transmit to our next generation the culture which we have inherited.
To preserve our future, education must teach content as well as processes for developing skills and attitudes. Young people from poorer backgrounds or from families without a good level of education often have an even greater need for cultural literacy than those students whose parents have enjoyed good education. Thus schools in poorer areas need curriculum guidance to ensure that they introduce their students to the wealth of our culture, rather than allowing content to be determined largely by the immediate interests of the majority of students. We live in a "here and now" generation dominated by mass media. The "relevant" and "immediate" are before students every day outside our schools. Unless our schools give students the opportunity to see the importance of our history and the richness of classical texts, both they and society will be the losers.
Many may be surprised that the Blackburn Report and the "Manifesto for a Democratic Curriculum" published by Dean Ashenden, Jean Blackburn, Bill Hannan and Doug White in 1984 made much of the need for a "common curriculum". They defined "common curriculum" as "the kind of knowledge which helps [students] participate productively and meaningfully in the general culture." This was expanded in 1985 by the Blackburn Report into the concept of "common studies" which "affirm the value of certain learning for all students and provide the meeting point for the members of a generation". In a triumph of circular logic, the "study of work in society" was held to be a "meeting point", and Australian Studies was born.
The aim of Australian Studies was to look at the history of work in society, and its relation to technological development. As Blackburn described it, the course was essentially "a form of socio-economic history brought forward into the present." Among its central propositions is the idea that Government "needs to intervene in order to promote equality of opportunity and an equitable distribution of wealth for all Australia." The course shows no interest in transmitting our inherited culture to the next generation. And in view of the subject matter it leaves out, it seems likely to diminish our capacity to relate internationally at the very time that problems in centrally important fields like Mathematics have been identified.
As Professor Geoff Opat, the Universities' representative on VCAB pointed out at the VCAB meeting in March 1987 which considered Australian Studies, the course fails to mention Australia's government, its legal system, its history, its geography, its relation to the rest of the world as a nation, or the achievements of its people in, for example, industry, agriculture, mining, science, technology, music, theatre, painting or sport. It is difficult to see why a "socio-economic history" is more important and more common to Victorian school students than any of these areas of knowledge.
Good education motivates students to learn for themselves
Unless students are excited by the process of learning, of discovering and testing truth and striving for achievement, they will quickly lose many of their education's benefits once they leave school, or indeed once they leave university. Independent study is an important goal, and in this area the VCE reforms offer very real advances if they are implemented carefully and sensitively.
Good education requires regular feedback to the student.
Unless students are told about their achievements, they have no basis on which to strive further nor encouragement to persist through difficulties. The child who gains 53 per cent in one English test but improves to 63 per cent in the next test has an incentive to continue improving. If both tests are simply graded "D", there is no incentive because the student's substantial effort will not be recognized. Likewise the person awarded a "B" at 79 per cent in a maths test is discouraged, whereas the person who gains an "A" with 81 per cent is reassured, despite the fact that both may be far below the outstanding student with 95 per cent or 100 per cent.
One of the preoccupations of "progressive education" is that no student should be disappointed by a result provided through assessment. The philosophy, now entrenched in some education circles, that "correction or designation of failure might damage students' self-esteem" has disturbing consequences. The number of army applicants rejected because of inadequate literacy training and comprehension has doubled since 1985. And many employers have expressed concern about pupils' actual achievements.
On paper it can look as if students with the same letter grade have completed work at the same level of mastery, even if one has received his "A" for an analysis of a friend's writing and the other for a critique of a Patrick White novel. The preoccupation with preventing people from knowing how well anyone has done is one of the abiding doctrinal concerns of those who have pressed for the current changes, and it has been one of the issues most doggedly defended despite all evidence of the need for change.
UNIVERSITY SELECTION
On the crucial issue of university selection, much will depend on how effective the verification process for the results of internal CATs proves to be. As pointed out by the McGaw Committee in the analysis of the trials for English and Mathematics in 1989, the verification process is critical. More than 150,000 CATs covering every single field of study are to be re-examined by verification meetings in the course of semesters three and four. Where a teacher's grades are judged inappropriate, the re-marking of all CATs in some schools will be required. The heavy workload to be undertaken by those chairing verification panels is to be accommodated within school release time -- at present only a small number of days in each year.
The universities will be monitoring very closely the distribution of grades across classes, schools and regions. Verification was abandoned in Queensland after only a few years of operation. There are significant differences between the Queensland system and that put in place by VCAB. Nevertheless, as the McGaw Committee pointed out, "whether verifiable results can be achieved across schools in the whole system in practice is a matter on which we will have to suspend judgment until further evidence is available."
The externally set and assessed CAT or CATs in each field of study will inevitably test different content and skills from the internally assessed CATs. They will be able to use the results from all CATs for selection, provided that they are satisfied that the verification process is reliable. They must develop criteria as to which CATs will carry which weight so that they do recognize those CATs which give the best measure of educational achievement for the purpose of selection into higher education. They will also need to introduce measures which will modify or weight the results of particular studies, taking into account the extent to which they do represent educational achievement or varying degrees of difficulty.
No doubt these processes will be controversial for those committed to "parity of esteem" and "equal outcomes", but selection into universities is a matter for the universities -- a principle sometimes known as "university autonomy." University selection is not, and should not be, controlled by VCAB or the Teachers' Federation of Victoria. Some subjects are more relevant than others as preparation for higher education and achievement in them and, therefore, more relevant as predictors of success at university. Unless selection is based on valid predictors of success in university study, many careers will be damaged, the quality of universities will deteriorate, and precious resources will be wasted at a time when our community can ill afford such wastage.
Inevitably some subjects have a greater proportion of bright students than do others. A system without proper weighting encourages students to enrol in subjects with fewer good students (often the easier subjects) where they will receive high marks, rather than encouraging them to enrol in harder subjects. The Victorian Secondary Teachers' Association recently threatened to withdraw its support for the VCE unless all CATs were counted equally and there was no standardization. The interests of such pressure groups are not relevant to the question of whether or not a selection process is fair, open and reliable. Students have a right to know what weight will be attached to the results in a particular study or to particular Common Assessment Tasks before they make their choice of subjects or embark on the year's work. Similarly, schools and teachers need this information to plan their educational program and to be sure that appropriate resources are available in the areas where they are most needed.
Careful analysis of VCE results and their capacity to predict achievement within higher education will need to be carried out throughout the transition period. They can only hope that serious distortions will be openly identified and rapidly remedied. Had they not gained finer grading of CATs, I believe it would have been imperative for the University of Melbourne to have developed independent assessment on a small number of carefully chosen subject areas which could have been used to select students. That is still an option on which they must rely if political or industrial action were to prevent them from handling data available from the VCE in a fair and open way. I very much hope that this will not be necessary.
WORK DONE BY STUDENTS OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM
All of the studies provide for independent work by students or by groups of students in preparing reports or essays. Let me say that I unequivocally support this approach as an important part of education. It is independent study and problem-solving which are most likely to motivate people to learn -- a principle of education which I share with the VCE's architects. However, there are problems in assigning the assessment of such project work a weight equal to other CATs in the process for selection of higher education.
The McGaw Committee assumed that students would act as watchdogs over each other to ensure that some were not assisted more than others. I find this hard to believe, as the whole basis of such work is to encourage students to explore their own sources. Furthermore, students are unlikely to write letters to VCAB complaining about their teachers. This is particularly so when, under a verified scheme, advantage to one student does not disadvantage another student in the same class.
A review of education reforms in Western Australia, recently completed under the Chairmanship of Professor Andrich, pointed to the "perceived widespread collusion among students, and between tutors and students" with such project work. He recommended to the Minister of Education, who commissioned the Report, that most, if not all, project work be reassessed under test conditions. VCAB seem either to be unaware of this study or unwilling to face up to the problem which, inevitably, will become an issue of public concern over the next two years.
I see it as right and proper for students to gain assistance from their parents, from teachers, from tutors, from other students, from school or municipal libraries, or any other source, when they are exploring ideas. There is, however, no way that all students will be similarly supported. I am most concerned about those students from poor homes or poor schools who simply cannot get the same level of assistance as those from more advantaged backgrounds.
If the assurances which VCAB give us about the verification processes are to be relied upon, students from poor backgrounds will gain much less satisfactory grades on work of this kind than on work carried out under standard test conditions. Indeed, the review by Darrel Caulley of La Trobe University of the CAT trials in 1989 indicated that the availability of resources is directly linked to the socio-economic background of the student. Caulley went on to find that these factors would be more influential to students' success in CATs than in HSC exams. It may well be, for this reason, that some CATs will need to be weighted differently so as to safeguard the very concerns of equality of opportunity which are so often trumpeted by the Victorian Secondary Teachers' Association.
THE NEW V.C.E. AND SOCIAL EQUITY
There is no doubt whatsoever that good teachers will teach well no matter what arrangements are put in place by the government. Furthermore, the VCE represents a major challenge to teachers who must themselves now design the curriculum for their students within a broad framework. More than ever, the single most important element in determining the quality of education received by a child will be the quality of the teachers in that child's school. At a time of change which will be stressful for teachers, any existing disparity in the quality of education will be widened. Good schools will give a better education, whilst those schools which have more difficulty in recruiting the best teachers will slip even further.
I also fear that increased teacher workloads will widen the gap between the better resourced selective public and private schools on the one hand, State and Catholic schools in poorer areas or the more remote country areas on the other. For once in this speech I would agree with the Victorian Secondary Teachers' Association: there is no doubt that teachers introducing the new VCE will face a massive increase in workload. Teachers must now devise not only a teaching program, but the curriculum as well. To do this they will need to spend many hours deciphering the "edspeak" of the VCE Study Designs.
An added burden of administration has been thrown onto teachers who must now certify that every student in each class has completed every work requirement, and that the work is their own. And then there are the administrative problems of storing two or three projects from every student so that they are available for perusal at verification meetings. Verification meetings themselves must be attended. These will require new skills for many teachers, and a substantial number of days away from school to attend all of the in-service programs to learn these skills.
As pointed out in the McGaw Report, there has been gross under-estimation of the time and resources required to make this process work effectively. Many of the private schools are planning substantial increases to their fees to pay for the demands on teacher time. We can only wonder whether a strapped State treasury will be able to pay for the state schools, or whether the real losers will be students in the classrooms of state schools, who will simply see less of their teachers.
If they can avoid damaging public controversy over standardization, then reliance by the tertiary institutions on the VCE results and the scores derived from them should be a safeguard against any serious loss of public confidence in the assessment system. If, however, public trust in VCE assessment is badly eroded, then there is a grave danger that employers as well as educational institutions will place greater reliance on those schools which they know to maintain high standards. Obviously the losers would again be those who for socio-economic reasons do not attend high prestige schools.
The desire I expressed earlier to avoid entrance examinations was not only due to the added burden which they would impose on already hard-pressed university staff. A greater concern is that those schools with student populations primarily seeking entry into higher education -- the selective government schools and many of the independent schools -- would concentrate their efforts on preparation for these tests rather than on the broader challenge of education. In this scenario, bright students from schools without the resources to prepare students for such examinations would inevitably be further disadvantaged, flying in the face of the first principle of education which I have espoused.
CONCLUSION
I would suggest that the most important force behind the VCE has been an ideological belief in its educational rectitude. Barry Corboy, President of the Victorian Teachers' Federation, commented recently that:
We don't believe that the Universities would want to [standardize marks] themselves. That really becomes them doing their own selection process.
The horror of the universities exercising their statutory duty to control their own selection reveals one of the hidden agendas of the VCE. The teachers' union believes that current university selection processes discriminate against lower socio-economic groups. They hope that change might be imposed upon the universities if the VCE made recognition of educational achievement unworkable as a basis for selection. The irony is that the VCE can work, but many aspects of it may in fact increase existing inequalities between rich and poor areas.
They are in the midst of the most radical change to higher education the State of Victoria has ever seen. They simply cannot afford to get things badly wrong. Were they to do so, those students whose careers would be seriously damaged would never forgive them. The depth of ideological belief in the VCE explains its passionate defence by educational theorists and those with a strong social/political agenda. Every part of the VCE has become an article of faith. Those who question any one part of the creed have been seen as traitors breaking caucus ranks. This type of thinking also explains the personalized attacks often made in defence of the VCE.
My concerns are not for students in schools with already high standards, committed to making the new system work and dedicated to looking after their students as individuals. Rather, I am concerned for any young person whose high potential and ability are wasted. For the individual it is a lost future. For the community it is a waste of talent which we can ill afford. As a nation we should be committed to developing our intellectual potential as the principle answer to our economic problems. As a society we should be committed to genuine equity, rather than using this term as a superficial political catch-cry. We must ensure that the VCE fulfils both of those commitments.
THE C.A.T. IS OUT OF THE BAG
WHEN you read all the VCE advertising literature you imagine that here is a scheme which will benefit education in Victoria. Indeed, some of the objectives of the VCE are highly commendable: the two-year program, the grouping into senior colleges, the wish to retain more students at school and to prepare them better for tertiary education and the workforce.
But while the designers of this course are well-meaning, they are from the '60s and '70s and have not caught up with the events of the 1980s, which will govern life in the 21st century. We must prepare our young people for a world very different from the one the designers of the VCE envisaged; the new world is distinguished by the triumph of capitalism and the retreat of communism.
Today leading Australian enterprises like BHP, Lend Lease, Pacific Dunlop, TNT, Brambles, CRA, CSR, WMC, and even Telecom are taking their talents abroad. Our people -- including those in the services sector -- must now compete with the best in the world. In Melbourne architects are designing hotels for European cities. In the future, the senior executives of major enterprises will be chosen from around the world. An American or Asian may head BHP.
Our business community is no longer isolated. Even our government's performance is judged internationally, and that, in part, affects the level of our interest rates and currency. Accordingly, our labour forces will be compared with others around the world and capital decisions will be made on a world basis. The AMP Society and National Mutual, two of our largest sources of capital, are world players. Australian institutions and investors, along with their world counterparts, can buy US steel shares as easily as they can buy BHP stock.
In the global context affecting our children's futures, the attainment of educational excellence and the capacity to compete with the rest of the world will matter greatly. The capacity of the community to provide the current level of health care, social services and public service pensions will depend on international conditions. 1960s and 1970s isolation, allowing business to concentrate on Australia, will well and truly have passed.
V.C.E. BEHIND THE TIMES
The world envisaged by the VCE is not international in this crucial sense. One of the very few compulsory subjects in the VCE is Australian Studies. Its handbook oozes the ideas of the 1960s and 1970s -- for example, the view that "the extent to which a community is fair and reasonable is reflected in the arrangements made for the generation and distribution of its wealth." Nowhere is there mention of capital, or of the need for a return on capital so that workers can enjoy the fruits of their labour. Yet these subjects will dominate world thinking for the next 20 to 30 years. If we don't have an educated workforce aware that we now face a world shortage of capital, and that the needs of modern employers must be met, there will be much less wealth to spread around.
Other countries understand the significance of the 1980s and will develop ideas about the creation of wealth ahead of us. Nowhere in the Australian Studies course is this prospect mentioned, nor is it suggested that the fairness of society depends upon the opportunity given to young people to generate their own wealth. As well as being exposed to ideas about wealth prominent in the '60s and '70s, students need to be taught newer ideas about the uses of capital and their relation to equity so they can make up their own minds about the best ways of ensuring economic growth.
Good teachers will of course adapt Australian Studies so that their students are prepared for the world, but weaker teachers will be less able to do so. Their problems will be compounded by the educational philosophy governing the course as a whole. Significantly, Australian Studies students are required to take an investigative and reflective approach to learning. Yet there are few mentions of reading. Instead, the course "encourages students to articulate and reflect on what they already know, and to treat this as the base on which to build further knowledge."
This view about knowledge seeps into many other aspects of the VCE, which is why the course will disadvantage Victorian children nationally and internationally. It is especially worrying that because Australian Studies is compulsory, students preparing for university will miss out on important subjects like a foreign language or biology, which don't suffer from such narrowness.
Behind the entire organization of VCE requirements is the idea of averaging down -- as we can see by looking at other parts of its program, starting with maths. As I understand it, the mathematical content of the course has been cut and replaced with more projects. The advocates of the course say that such a move will develop children's abilities in more desirable ways. But it seems obvious that their better children will fall dangerously behind other countries and many other states in the development of mathematical skills.
The notion of averaging down responsible for VCE maths is also responsible for the very high rating given to the study of films in English Literature and English. Films might be good for those who are struggling, but they need to extend their best people to their ultimate by encouraging them to read and to appreciate reading's importance.
COURSE DIVERSITY INVITES INEQUALITY
An additional problem with the VCE is that most of the course plans are really only broad guidelines. Each school will need to design its own courses for its own students. There is no system more inefficient and cruel than one which makes no provision for children whose teachers are not up to designing entire courses. Talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds will of course suffer.
Previously, children born on the wrong side of the river and attending the wrong school at least studied the same course and went for the same exam. Now such children are really up against it. "Satisfactorily completed" on a course of study will inevitably carry more weight in some schools than others. Brilliant children will find it hard to shine. Yet we are meant to be producing the leaders of the future.
Without know-how, how can you complete any project, whether it be constructing a house or educating children? The VCE people said, "Let's get started and we will work out the finishing on the way." With the VCE underway in Year 11, we still don't know the university and tertiary entrance criteria. I am sure the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne can explain this better than I, but I am appalled at what was originally prepared.
The proposal that common assessment tasks be marked out of five, instead of the university suggestion of 15 or the latest report's recommendation of 10, concerns me. (1) I'm also concerned about the absence of all but one required exam, and the cheating that will take place if school projects are used on a major scale. If the wrong people are accepted at universities, the failure rate there will go much higher -- unless standards come down. That would be in line with the averaging-down philosophy of the VCE course.
They all must hope and pray that men like David Penington and Professor Mal Logan from Monash don't lose their nerve as others afraid of funding cuts have done. Professor Logan tells me there is an incredible number of soft subjects in the VCE. So I hate to think of some of the subjects with which their talented people will end up. Ten per cent of the available course plans use the word "society". I suspect that the society which students will study is the one outlined in Australian Studies. Many children tempted into such courses will be in trouble when they seek jobs.
The VCE is a scheme which encourages the top schools to tailor their courses to minimize failure. So many students will end up with a piece of paper that no one will trust. I was appalled today to hear the views of a person from the '60s and the Vietnam War era, Bill Hannan. I understand he is the Chairperson of the State Education Board, yet he was prepared to advocate a ballot for university entrance. Clearly he wants to bring the standards down.
The CAT is out of the bag. The VCE is a course designed for a world that went out with Tiananmen Square. The Chinese know that ultimately their future lies with bringing their leaders to high levels of academic training and excellence. We can only hope our top colleges and universities don't get crushed by the tanks of the old order.
A BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE
Today I stand here, not as an expert on secondary education around Australia, but rather as an employer in the financial services industry who needs good people from our schools in order to run a successful business. I do not have a thorough knowledge of how best to teach our children, or the precise ordering of subjects which best prepares a student for life after school. Yet I am interested in the skills and abilities of school leavers and graduates at the time they enter the workforce.
To illustrate the bounds of this interest, I would like to take you through the criteria by which I judge a potential employee. There are four elements on which I judge a job applicant.
The first is the quality of the application submitted. The elements considered include legibility, grammar, spelling, whether or not there is a resumé, references, supporting material such as official results, the reasons for applying and so forth. There are many excellent or very good applications. However, some are atrocious, including those submitted by people who have passed Level 10 or above at school.
The second area I consider is school results. I am particularly concerned with English and Mathematics results. While, in general, school results do correlate with an employee's skills, this is not always the case. For this reason I test applicants on the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic.
My major concern has been that until the interview stage I cannot be sure of the ability of the applicant to communicate orally. Often applicants with excellent results are unable to express themselves verbally. It is interesting to note that the new VCE has included a common assessment task for oral work.
While I do not know the reasons why school results and skills do not correlate, I can make some guesses. Subjects are assessed internally by schools, particularly below Year 12. It is possible that teachers vary considerably in the standards they apply to assessment. Some subjects may be "soft options"; others may prepare students in a select way for narrow careers.
In considering Year 12 school leavers I rely heavily on the result of one examination. External examinations have their place. They give employers a measure of performance which is common across all schools. They indicate how well an applicant works under pressure. However, they fail to indicate whether or not an applicant is capable of sustained work or research, or has oral or interpersonal skills.
The new Victorian Certificate of Education does seem to address some of these concerns. As an employer I applaud the Common Assessment Tasks which provide more information on applicants' performance across a wider range of activities. In addition, all courses are now subject to some external assessment, a definite move forward from the old situation in Victoria, where the assessment of some subjects had no external component. I am now able to obtain more detail on the requirements of study through Years 11 and 12. All students across the State must complete set tasks to obtain a pass.
The initial reaction to the study design booklets and sample result forms for Mathematics and English has been positive. I believe the new VCE will better enable me to assess potential applicants. Knowing the work requirements, I will be able to ask for samples of work where I need more detail regarding the applicant's capabilities. While only time will tell, I also believe that the stricter work requirements will lead to better quality school leavers over the long term.
The third factor in assessing applicants is evidence of leadership qualities. A student who has been a school prefect or sports captain, or has had some other position of responsibility, has a distinct advantage over one who has not.
The fourth and perhaps most important area is past work experience. This includes part-time work, vacation work, and full-time work. Of these, full-time work is the most important. Achievement in past jobs gives me valuable additional information on the skills and abilities of the applicant. Together with school results I am better able to assess the potential of the applicant.
UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS OF WORK
Work experience is important for another reason. It is almost impossible to judge the attitude of applicants until they are actually employed. Yet one factor that does seem to correlate with commitment to work is the amount of work experience.
I am sure you can see where this is leading. Although I employ many people with no tertiary qualification, I prefer these to have some post-school work experience. I suspect that my attitude is representative of the financial services sector as a whole. I believe that the move from full-time education to work results in a type of culture shock.
Many new school leavers are unable to settle to work. Many of them expect the world to lie at their fingertips: clerk today, supervisor in six months, manager in two years. Alternatively, they expect all work to be interesting and are not prepared for the mundane activities that are part and parcel of all jobs. Somehow the education curriculum fails to prepare school leavers for the business world.
In 1986 the Business Council of Australia did an Australia-wide survey on education. I intend to concentrate on the results of this survey as they apply to secondary education.
The first result of note is the adequacy of recruits from secondary school. There was not one area where 50 per cent or more of employers believed that the current standard of school leavers was good. The standard of general knowledge, the ability to work independently, the ability to make decisions, and the ability to solve problems together with making a decision were considered to be adequate to poor. However, there were three areas where it was believed that the standard was adequate to good: learning skills, keenness to enhance relevant skills, and skills in using technology.
In three areas 50 per cent or more of respondents believed that the current standard was poor: written communication skills, business knowledge, and understanding of the nature of work sought. While I have found that paper qualifications are a reliable guide as to actual capabilities of most recruits, only 45 per cent of employers agreed with me, with 50 per cent not agreeing.
What do employers consider the most important goals and outcomes of secondary education? The basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, learning, thinking, and problem-solving skills, and learning about work and career choice. It is disturbing that over 75 per cent of responding employers believed that too little emphasis is given to these areas.
Of the other goals and outcomes considered, only learning about the theory of vocational skills and learning about academic subjects (considered to be 6th and 7th in order of importance) were considered to have enough emphasis by over 50 per cent of respondents. The main problem, in the Business Council's view, is that there is a gap between school education and the requirements of business.
The Business Council believes that it is appropriate first to comment on the quality of school leavers and second to influence the education sector at strategic and policy level. It has developed a number of guiding principles which can be divided into three areas.
ACCOUNTABILITY AND ACHIEVEMENT
The first area concerns teacher accountability and other structural matters which, although important, I will ignore due to time constraints. The exception is teacher/business interface, which I will address in some detail.
The second area concerns curriculum. The Council believes that Business and the Education System should work closely together to devise strategies to improve the quality and achievements of all students. Business considers that the provision of opportunities for each student to develop to their maximum potential should be a major goal of educators.
In the curricula there should be increased emphasis on communication skills; analytical, problem solving, and decision-making skills; the use and development of new technologies; and sound means of helping students to apply these skills to the world in which they live. Students should be encouraged to achieve results, to develop their potential, to accept responsibility, to work in teams, and to take leadership roles.
In Years 11 and 12 curricula should be flexible -- to address the range of needs of students who differ in academic ability and career aspirations; and more rigorous in the areas of technology/science, mathematics and arts/humanities. The flexibility of the curriculum does depend upon the availability and cost of resources. The cost of supporting a VCE subject with very few students is exorbitant, and compromise between the objective and practicalities will be needed.
The final area concerns assessment. The Business Council believes that the continuation of external examinations as part of the evaluation process for Year 12 gives business organizations a broad benchmark to use with other measures of student potential during the recruitment process, and provides a broad measure of the excellence of schools and teachers. The problems of business knowledge and attitudes, which are a major concern, need to be attacked jointly by education and business.
The Council has recommended two thrusts: the promotion of a realistic image of the business sector to teachers and students; and the introduction of a number of business/ industry experience programmes for teachers. More specifically, the Council recommends:
- Upgraded and improved career counselling methods and facilities. I know that this is an area which has improved greatly already.
- More challenging formal and informal work experience programs, offered by more organizations.
- Business-sponsored visits from career guidance teachers so that they can develop a first-hand knowledge of different business organizations.
- Vacation employment schemes.
- Schemes such as the school-industry personnel exchange, to encourage teachers to understand the work environment better.
- Programs sponsored by business which give students practical experience of the world at work.
I believe these measures will help narrow the gap between school and work. School leavers who have the necessary communication skills and analytical and problem-solving skills, together with the right attitude to work and a willingness to learn, make excellent employees. If the various education departments work towards these outcomes, they will, over the long term, build a better workforce ready to meet the global challenges of the business world.
ENDNOTES
1. A compromise 10-point scale was agreed upon after this paper had been given.
