Response to MCEETYA Reporting Protocols

APPA’s response to the revised MCEETYA principles and protocols for reporting on schooling in Australia

Click here to download the response in PDF format.

Click here to read the revised MCEETYA principles and protocols (in a PDF file on the MCEETYA website).

The text of APPA's response is:

APPA has sought to establish a professionally responsible position regarding the national transparency agenda, supporting the principle of transparency but insisting that appropriate safeguards are put in place.

Unfortunately, the revised MCEETYA statement of protocols does not address the concerns expressed in APPA’s policy statement.

In its present form, the statement is too general and vague to reassure primary principals. The language in the document, if adopted, would allow a wide range of possible actions, some clearly detrimental to primary education. As they say, ‘the devil is in the detail’. There is plenty of appropriate protection for individual children (as there should be), some protection for states and systems, but very little protection for schools.

Contextual information
The statement refers to publishing school results with ‘contextual information’ as though the contextual information will alleviate the concerns of principals.

Will the contextual information include commentary such as:

• There is no adequate teacher housing in the community so teachers do not apply or stay.
• Systemic authorities have been unable to appoint a specialist teacher in literacy for over 18 months because of the school’s location.
• There are no teachers on staff who have more than 2 years experience.
• Transiency exceeds 40 per cent of the currently enrolled student body.
• The school has no Internet access.
• Teacher assistants have limited literacy skills.
• The percentage of children with autism is over 8 per cent, there are other students with severe intellectual impairments and there is no appropriate support for them.
• The school can’t get access to speech pathologists.
• Many of the parents have severe problems of substance abuse that government agencies have been unable to ameliorate.

These are not given as excuses but as examples of serious problems that may take years to address and which are not evident in socio-economic indices or other global statistics.

The net effect of the proposed system will be to drive principals and teachers out of challenging schools because they feel they will be made scapegoats by the media, and perhaps, even by governments.

Reading between the lines, it appears that MCEETYA intends to proceed quickly and address the concerns raised by APPA and other organisations along the way. In other words, rather than establish what kind of contextual information is needed to fairly evaluate a school’s performance, governments will use what is available even though it falls well short of what should be reported in a system reliant on explanatory contextual information. Schools are expected to wear the consequences of this expediency.

Error margins
The protocols promise the reporting of error margins. Currently the NAPLAN document contains error margins for states, year levels and sectional groups. If school results are to be published then error margins must be published for each school result.

If MCEETYA recommends that the results be used for individual student comparisons then the error margins must be reported here as well.

The principle of transparency must apply just as stringently to the methods used by ACARA to generate school results.

Currently, there is no access for schools and independent researchers to the NAPLAN technical data.

It is possible that very small differences in correct answers on a NAPLAN test indicate very wide differences in the competence of students or the performance of schools. At present, schools are expected to trust that MCEETYA/ACARA has got it right.

Suppose a school has good Year 3 results, moderately good Year 5 results and disappointing Year 7 results. Will the results be combined to form a composite result?

Protection against misuse

The protocols are silent on the issue of the possibility of unethical manipulation of results.

There is also no comment on the dangers of too much test preparation. Educators have long been aware of the negative effects of university entrance exams on the education of students in Years 11 and 12. Because of the proposed uses of the tests there will be similar pressures on primary teachers. The evidence is crystal clear that the net effect of such high stakes testing will be to narrow the primary curriculum.

Evidence from abroad
It is ironic that Australia is about to follow in the footsteps of the US and UK at a time when after a decade of such testing and public reporting there is a growing consensus that on balance the advantages of such a system are outweighed by the disadvantages.

To argue that Australia should follow the example of New York City and the state of Florida, as reported recently in the editorial of a national newspaper, and embark on the testing and reporting is unsettling. These jurisdictions have some of the worst schools in the US and hardly set a benchmark for Australian education systems.