But they should be equipped with better skills and better tools. And it is hard to identify and kick-start learning for those students whose progress has stalled.Ĭlassroom teachers must do most of this hard work. It is hard to know whether each student is learning enough each year. The Australian curriculum provides high-level guidance, but it is not enough either. NAPLAN, designed to provide consistent and comparable national information, is not suitable for these highly targeted purposes. It is hard to develop materials and methods that tailor teaching to what each student is ready to learn next. It is hard to develop accurate student assessments that give teachers the reliable, diagnostic information they need. Most systems provide too little support to schools and teachers to collect and harness deep knowledge about student learning. These obvious statements are surprisingly hard to achieve in practice. Good information guides teachers about what each student is ready to learn next and how to teach it. Teachers need more information on their students’ progressĪ wealth of evidence shows that teaching is more powerful when teachers have accurate, precise and timely information about what their students know, understand and can do. ![]() It is, provided it is put in the right hands. This is not to say that information is not essential to school improvement. Across countries and economies, educational performance is unrelated to whether or not schools have to compete for students. Recent research from the OECD supports these findings. Most parents don’t shop around schools based on NAPLAN results. For many reasons, most parents either can’t or won’t move their children from schools that perform poorly on NAPLAN to schools that perform well. As the Grattan Institute’s report The myth of markets in school education shows, most schools face limited competition, and more information about them does little to increase it. Unfortunately, choice and competition are in practice much less effective at improving schools than we might wish. This approach has informed much of the government’s school education policy over the last decade. The invisible hand of the market, mediated through parental choice, will lift outcomes across the education system. Faced with competitive pressure on enrolments, schools will find ways to improve learning. Parents armed with data about school performance will in theory choose the best school for their children. How could information on My School improve outcomes? The government, as its response to the review noted,īelieves that transparency and accountability are essential to support parents and community participation in schools and to drive improved school and student outcomes. The review of My School has argued for strengthening this focus on student progress.īut the philosophy underpinning My School extends well beyond the desire to put accurate information in parents’ hands. It’s heartening that reporting of the 2014 NAPLAN results focused more on schools with strong student gains than simply on schools with top marks. A focus on student progress – how much an individual student has learnt over a given period - is a better indication of a school’s performance. But if we look at achievement data, we may learn more about what students knew when they entered the school than what their school has taught them.
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