YEARS 9-12 EDUCATION IN TASMANIA: A RESPONSE TO THE ACER REVIEW
In July 2016 the Tasmanian Government commissioned the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) ‘to undertake an independent review of Years 9 to 12 concerning the following issues:
• student and workforce data
• curriculum policy and provision (including vocational education and training - VET)
• design and delivery for Years 9 to 12 (which includes the three Tasmanian education sectors: the Tasmanian Catholic Education Office (TCEO), Independent Schools Tasmania (IST) and the Department of Education (DoE)).’[19][1]
The Report was released in early March 2017, and soon thereafter was tabled in the Parliament by the Minister for Education, the Hon. Jeremy Rockliff. It can be downloaded from the Department of Education web site here.
While we find things of great importance to commend in the Report, it is nonetheless a curious and disappointing document. It perpetuates muddles about the nature of year 12 attainment; does not use the most reliable performance data; fails to consider readily available information which would have shown important assumptions that the Review adopts are dubious; does not draw obvious inferences from the information it does provide – some of it very valuable new information; suggests policy changes which would be a disaster for many Tasmanian young people; fails to provide the national context for some significant aspects of the Tasmanian Yrs 9-12 education system to which it refers; and in all adopts a conservative, inward looking and defensive approach to senior secondary – and university - education in Tasmania, which is strikingly at odds with the thinking which is needed to identify the progressive change required. Nor, indeed, does the Review identify and give credit to the teachers and principals who are leading change.
We will consider the Report under the following headings which we believe get to the heart of the problems with its analysis:
1. The concept of Year 12 completion
2. Statistics about Year 12 completions: do we have a problem?
3. Year 12 completion and university entry
4. What the Review thinks we learn from the data they present on educational performance
5. Public accountability and our use of education statistics
6. Finding a basis to fairly evaluate the performance of Tasmania’s senior secondary system
7. Student aspirations
8. Staffing
9. Curriculum
10. VET and VEL
11. The TCE
12. The structure of senior secondary schooling
1. The concept of Year 12 completion
The Review gets off to a bad start, stating
The major statistic for this Review is the measure of Year 12 completion. [34]
This leads the Review into a maze of conceptual confusion we will encounter throughout our discussion. This muddle could easily have been avoided if, from the outset, the Review had used the definitions employed by MySchool to distinguish between completing senior secondary school and attaining a senior secondary certificate. The use of these MySchool definitions would have achieved a clear distinction between these two key statistics, as follows:
Completed senior secondary school: the number of students who left school having completed the equivalent of two or more years post Year 10 studies (not necessarily full-time nor consecutive) who are eligible for a statement of results, or a record of achievements.
Senior secondary certificate awarded: the number of students who left school having fulfilled the requirements for a senior secondary certificate issued by a Board of Studies in the relevant state or territory.[2]
And indeed, we note in passing, the Review itself acknowledges the need for this distinction, but much later, stating
Perhaps the most important and misunderstood concept is ‘completion of Year 12’. This concept can sometimes also be conflated with ‘staying on’ and ‘finishing school’. [164]
For completeness of its key statistics the Review might have added, using its measure of equivalence [45],
Year 12 equivalent: the number of students who left school, or a VET provider, having fulfilled the requirements of a certificate III (or higher).[3]
These are the statistics we need to know to assess the performance of our post-compulsory education and training system: how many students continued their education until they had reached the end of year 12 (versus how many dropped out before, including part-way through Year 12); and how many gained a Year 12 level qualification, either the senior secondary certificate, or (at least) a certificate III.
However, the Review decided to use the ambiguous notion of ‘Year 12 completion’ as its major statistic. It then immediately compounded the muddle about what this might be taken to mean by giving credence to concerns expressed in the consultations about the ‘inconsistency’ of ‘statistics that had been reported about education in public discussion of Tasmania’s rate of Year 12 attainment’, claiming
In some cases, it is a problem of using the Tasmanian Certificate of Education (TCE) as the sole measure of Year 12 completion, ignoring alternative certificates, such as the Qualifications Certificate (QC) and the Tasmanian Certificate of Educational Achievement (TCEA). [34]
But as is clear from the web site of the Tasmanian senior secondary authority, the Office of Tasmanian Assessment, Standards and Certification (TASC), the Qualifications Certificate is not a Year 12 qualification:
The Qualifications Certificate (QC) is issued by TASC. It is available to all Tasmanians who have gained one or more post-compulsory qualifications accredited or recognized by TASC.
The Qualifications Certificate shows all qualifications with awards in TASC accredited senior secondary courses, qualifications (and awards if applicable) in TASC recognized courses, and Vocational Education and Training (VET) qualifications and units of competency that a learner has achieved.
Clearly, the Qualifications Certificate is a record of achievements not a qualification. It bears the same relation to a qualification – the TCE say, or a VET Certificate – as your bank statement bears to the balance in your account.
As to the Tasmanian Certificate of Educational Achievement, while this is an important qualification for those who overcome the obstacles to learning they need to have encountered to qualify for its award, the TASC makes clear these are few in number:
The Tasmanian Certificate of Educational Achievement (TCEA) is a quality assured, centrally issued certificate that describes achievement through narrative. Designed for the small number of students whose learning and achievement is often not adequately recognized by standardized forms of certification, it will provide a fairer and more just account of their senior secondary learning success. [emphasis added]
It is surprising that the Review should conflate these three different certificates. Further this added confusion prevented their finding a way out of the muddle created by the puzzling decision to use ‘completing Year 12’ as their key statistic. But for this confusion of certificates, the Review could have simply said that ‘completing Year 12’ means gaining the TCE (or its VET equivalent), save for the students for whom this is not possible, but these are so few in number as not to affect any conclusion that might be drawn from taking the number of TCEs awarded in any one year as the measure of senior secondary certificate completions for public accountability purposes. Especially since the Review had previously stated, in contradiction to the claim just quoted (i.e. that completing Year 12 in Tasmania should not be equated with gaining the TCE),
no other jurisdiction has a statement about completion that does not include the award of the senior secondary certificate.[21, emphases added]
At this point the reader is at a loss to say what the Review proposes as its ‘major statistic’, the measure of Year 12 completion in Tasmania. The Review ‘resolves’ this issue in a wholly unsatisfactory way, simply moving on to cite other sources all of which (other than data from the TASC) are based on the national census or surveys, which essentially solve the problem of what to count as Year 12 completion by asking respondents whether they think they have completed Year 12. Clearly, their answers must be treated with great caution.
2. Statistics about Year 12 completions: do we have a problem?
First the Review turns to the Mitchell Institute, which reported that, as at 2015, 74% of Australian young people had attained a Year 12 or equivalent certificate by age 19, and that for Tasmania the figure was 60%. [Educational Opportunity in Australia 2015, p. 42] The source of this data is the ABS Census of Population and Housing. This data will be as reliable as the populations’ understanding of what counts as attaining Year 12. If we trust this data it tells us that Tasmania is positioned midway between WA and the Northern Territory. That would seem to be a problem, but perhaps, as the Mitchell Institute suggests, this should be seen as, at least in part, a consequence of our relative poverty and lack of a major capital city, rather than a reflection on our senior secondary system.
Next the Report turns to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Survey of Education and Work (SEW), which gathers data on Year 12 or equivalent completion, in all jurisdictions, by asking people surveyed whether they completed Year 12, or a Certificate III or above. This puts Tasmania’s Year 12 or equivalent completion rate for 20-24 year olds at 77.1% for 2016, compared to the national figure of 89.2%.[4] Again, this would seem to be a problem, but from this the Review draws the conclusion that ‘there are indications that the attainment of a Year 12 or equivalent certificate is increasing,’ and leaves the matter there. [45]
However, a cursory inspection of the data [Table 4 of the Report, p.45] suggests other conclusions are much better supported.
First, the data for Tasmania from this source is extraordinary volatile. In 2012 it was 68.4% - the lowest from 2007 to 2016. In 2013 it jumps to 81.2%, before falling back to 70.2% in 2014. The differences here are of the order of 900 persons or so, or about half of the TCE graduates from all of the colleges put together. Looking at the longer trend the figures are more stable, but do not suggest an improving trend we should be satisfied with: the figure for 2016 (77.1%) is just 4% above 2007, while the whole of Australia has improved 7% in the same time - from 82.3% to 89.2%. So if this data is to be trusted, we are both improving relative to ourselves, and falling further behind Australia as a whole. It is incredibly inward looking to notice the former, but not the latter. And from the volatility of this data it would appear to be just luck that the data suggest the Tasmanian Year 12 completion rate is improving at all – if the series had ended at 2015 rather than 2016 and we are to judge performance by the difference between individual years starting from 2007, we would have to say we had gone backwards. At 68.5%, 2015 is the lowest year in the series with the exception of 2012 (68.4%), well below 2007 at 73.1%. Clearly, even if we are satisfied with being self-referential by not looking at the rest of Australia, we need to look at the overall trend in the data rather than individual years - and for Tasmania, that is fundamentally flat with 2013 an outlier.
Finally, the Review uses the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) which gathered data from a sample of students from each jurisdiction, who had turned 15 in 2009. LSAY reported that by 2015, 82% of the Tasmanian sample had attained a Year 12 certificate or a VET Certificate III, compared to 91% in NSW and up to 98% in Queensland. Again, this too would seem to be a problem, but the Review does not draw this conclusion. Rather they claim the data shows that while Tasmanian students start behind, they catch up:
By 2012, 51 per cent of Tasmanian participants had obtained a Year 12 certificate or VET Certificate III; in all other jurisdictions that figure was more than 73 per cent. The gap between Tasmania and the other jurisdictions closed by 2014.[46]
How do they reach a conclusion so at odds with what the data presented in their Figure 8 [46] reveals (as reproduced below)? First, they claim that
In Tasmania, the majority of these [15 year old] students were in Year 9, and would have reached Year 12 later than most other participants. [46]
But this is false, as the graph itself suggests. In all jurisdictions apart from Queensland and Western Australia, very few students in the cohort completed Year 12 by 2011, with the majority of completions in 2012, including in Tasmania. Looking carefully at the LSAY data itself explains why Tasmania is not out of step with most other jurisdictions here – though not performing up to their level:
Table 1: Year level of students in 2009 LSAY cohort
Students’ year level in 2009 / NSW / VIC / QLD / SA / WA / TAS / NT / ACTYear 9 or below / 11.3% / 20.2% / 1.4% / 5.9% / 2.0% / 32.7% / 5.4% / 13.6%
Year 10 / 83.6% / 77.7% / 50.2% / 84.6% / 44.9% / 67.2% / 84.0% / 85.3%
Year 11 / 5.0% / 2.0% / 48.2% / 9.5% / 52.9% / 0.1% / 10.5% / 1.0%
Year 12 / 0.2% / 0.1% / 0.2% / 0.1%
Extracted from LSAY QuickStats Y09 – Education
Certainly more Tasmanian than other students in the LSAY 09 cohort were in Year 9 in 2009, but just 32.7%, not a majority as the Review claims, and only about 10% more than Victoria (20.2%), 20% more than the ACT (13.6%) and NSW (11.3%), and so on. So the age of our students for their year level is, at best, only a part of the explanation of the 20-30% gap in Year 12 attainment by 2012 shown in the graph, and likewise the 10-20% gap that remains in 2013.