Spanish cow

School rankings in Australia

In Australia, like in the UK, the Government has recently sanctioned the use of comparison tables in order to rank schools according to their performance on literacy and numeracy tests. There’s been a lot of discussion about this, with many fearing that the rankings will become a form of ‘league tables’, pitting schools against each other. One of the concerns is, clearly, that the schools, which are apparently grouped according to similarly in demographics—such as socio-economic status or geographic location—will be inappropriately grouped, and that schools will be unfairly compared. A private school in a low socio-economic status area, for example, might be ranked against the local public school. While the former can pick and choose its students, who might come from nearby more affluent suburbs, the local school may not have any options about the students it selects, and may therefore struggle to achieve the same results.

Another issue with the school rankings is that they focus very narrowly on certain types of achievement. Yes, literacy and numeracy are important, but will the league tables tell us which schools are trying to address literacy amongst a student body who may primarily come from non-English speaking backgrounds? Will they tell us anything about, say, the pastoral activities offered by the school, such as counselling services, or efforts to engage the wider community? Do they say anything about a school’s extra-curricular activities, or the caring nature of their staff, or about their arts and music programs?

While parents deserve to know how their children are doing in school, school rankings are a problematic and short-sighted way of attempting to disseminate this information. Parents should instead get involved with their children’s school to get a better idea of its pedagogical, pastoral, and extracurricular emphases. Not only will they benefit, but the schools can learn more about parents’ and students’ preferences and needs, too.

You all know, I every so often look into online programs as a matter of interest and I have recently found a organisation that does online human resources software. To have all applicable people logged into a central network seems like a really convenient idea to me, also a useful time saver, I have no idea why this is the first time it is getting popular.