APPA Calls for Safeguards on School Performance Data

Please note: There are three documents linked to this page. Reading all three will give you a good perspective on the issue of transparency and accountability surrounding the proposed publication of school performance data at the end of 2009.

1. In a press release issued today, the Australian Primary Principals Association (APPA) today called for safeguards to be built into the Ministerial Council for Education Employment and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) recently announced plans to publish the performance of schools on national tests. APPA President, Leonie Trimper, said that while the organisation supported greater transparency in the education system, it was concerned by the lack of safeguards in place around the release of the NAPLAN test data.

Click here to download and read the full press release (120Kb pdf file).

2. The press release accompanied APPA's paper called: Australian Primary Principals Association position paper on the publication of nationally comparable school performance information. The introduction to the paper states:

"APPA supports the principle of transparency on the understanding that appropriate safeguards are put in place to ensure that the release of information about students and schools has a beneficial impact on primary education and that the potential negative effects have been nullified.

"The research evidence from the United States and Britain clearly shows that high stakes assessment programs, such as NAPLAN, can have an unintended, negative impact on the quality of teaching and learning when low performance is heavily sanctioned. In particular, schools tend to narrow their curriculum around the focus of the tests, the importance of areas of the curriculum that are not assessed is diminished, higher order skills that are not able to be tested decline, large amounts of valuable instructional time are consumed by coaching and practising tests, a testing industry grows which is driven by its own commercial interests and authorities and schools are encouraged to participate in various forms of ‘gaming’ designed to improve performance. Hence, it is important to protect primary schools from such consequences.

In response to the decision of MCEETYA, this policy paper outlines the arrangements that APPA believes should be put in place in the interest of all Australian primary schools."

Click here to download and read the complete paper (85.7Kb pdf file).

3. In a recent article in the UK's The Sunday Times (26 April 2009), Ken Boston, the former chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in England, wrote:

"The present problem is not the result of inadequacies in the primary curriculum. The curriculum needs to be reviewed, and this is being done by Sir Jim Rose, but there is not much wrong with it and much to say in its favour. The real problem is that teachers and schools aren’t able to get on with teaching it.

"That is because the government’s approach to the key stage tests has sucked the oxygen from the classrooms of primary schools. It is not the tests themselves so much as the high stakes attached to them, the archaic method of delivery and marking and the multitude of invalid uses to which the results are put. In all but those schools principled enough to resist the pressure upon them, the primary school curriculum has become a dry husk. The teaching programme focuses on what is to be tested and on practising for the tests, because the future of the school (not that of your son or daughter) is dependent upon the result." 

Click here to read the complete article (17.3Kb pdf file).