Abstract
In this article, we map the extent of educational inequality within Tasmania, and between Tasmania and the rest of Australia, using National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and senior secondary attainment data. This analysis yields some surprising findings, showing the success of Tasmanian primary and high schools and that Tasmanian educational inequality is most strongly expressed at the senior secondary level. We conclude that using such publicly available data to identify differential achievement within and between jurisdictions would strengthen public policy and practitioner interventions aimed at achieving more equal educational outcomes for students in all schools. Our findings also have implications for research directions in this field, suggesting that by analysis of NAPLAN and My School data across individual schools and jurisdictions academic researchers could assist practitioners gain a deeper understanding of inequalities reproduced by the systems they are working within, while finding examples of schools and systems which show a greater level of success in ameliorating disadvantage.
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Notes
Since 2008, standardised NAPLAN tests are administered to all students in grades 3, 5, 7 and 9, with around 90% participation in all states in the 2015 Year 9 tests. (ACARA 2015).
In the same way, Picketty must assume that it is in a person’s interest to have a larger rather than a smaller share of GDP (or national income; his measure is derived from this) to claim that unequal distribution of wealth constitutes economic inequality, and he makes this assumption, cogent criticisms of the concept of GDP and its use as a measure of well-being by Stiglitz and a host of others notwithstanding.
According to the OECD (2017) “countries across the world share the goal of minimising any adverse impact of students’ socio-economic status on their performance in school. PISA shows that, rather than assuming that inequality of opportunity is set in stone, school systems can become more equitable over a relatively short time”.
As the reader will see below, the most surprising conclusion supported by our data is the strong NAPAN performance of Tasmania’s low ICSEA schools, compared to their very weak results at Year 12. To ensure this was not peculiar to the low ICSEA schools chosen, after completing the analysis of the selected sample we identified all of the Tasmanian high schools with lower ICSEAs than those in the sample, for which the relevant data were available, and found that in relation to NAPLAN two conformed to the pattern of the sample in as much as they were top or near-top performers (Smithton and Winnaleah high schools), and two did not (Cosgrove and Glenora), while in relation to Year 12 taken together their results were just below the lowest ICSEA school in our sample. We concluded that the inclusion of these additional schools in the full analysis would not have affected our results.
Schools from WA were excluded since their Year 12 attainment data in 2015 are not comparable with other years because of a change to the school starting age in 2001 which worked its way through the system until 2015, when there was a ‘half cohort’ of students.
The definition of this measure given on My School is not the same for every jurisdiction. To ensure comparability across jurisdictions, we looked at Year 12 certificate completion data in the Annual School Reports of a random selection of fifteen of the similar schools to Burnie High School (chosen by its alphabetical position as the first named Tasmanian school in our list, and thus randomly in relation to the matter at hand), including schools from all states in the collection. This shows that the measure is similarly defined and reported across jurisdictions by the schools themselves and My School, which gives confidence that the My School data are comparable for schools in different jurisdictions.
Note that this measure of senior secondary success—the percentage of the Year 12 class gaining the senior secondary certificate—is overly fair to Tasmanian schools in general. A school, or system, can inflate the percentage of students finishing schooling after Year 12 that gain their Year 12 certificates by reducing the rate of retention to Year 12. But Tasmania has the lowest rate of retention to Year 12 of all jurisdictions apart from the Northern Territory—with an apparent retention rate from Year 7 to Year 12, in 2015, of 71.7% compared to 84.4% nationally (ACER 2016, p. 40; Table 2).
Information supporting this article is available from University of South Australia’s Research Data Access Portal, http://dx.doi.org/10.4226/78/5ab43c883ced9.
As the full dataset shows, Mountain Heights and Campbell Town are clear leaders in their group of similar schools, with other lower ICSEA Tasmanian schools, Huonville and Scottsdale, not far behind.
For example, the current Tasmanian Liberal Government’s 2014 pre-election education policy referred to the State’s students “consistently performing below the national average in literacy and numeracy national testing” (Tasmanian Liberals 2014).
The Year 12 certificate data here are taken from ACER (2016, p. 59) Fig. 14.
Note that the base of the percentages given here are not the same. The base of the percentage of students above the national minimum standard in Year 9 NAPLAN is the total Year 9 cohort for 2012. The base of the percentage of students gaining their Year 12 certificate in 2015 is one-fifth of the resident population aged 15–19 years in 2015.
Note that ICSEAs for the colleges are for 2011, the only year My School provides these data, while those for the schools are for 2015. As the basis for calculating the ICSEA was changed in 2013, and ICSEAs for all schools are recalculated every year and can be affected by annual variations in, for example, the employment market, the placement of the colleges in ICSEA order here should be considered approximate rather than precise.
Factors identified in this study are frequently cited as explaining Tasmania’s low Year 12 attainment rates, for example, the submission by the Tasmanian branch of the Australian Education Union to the ACER Review (Garsed 2016).
Part-time study over three or four years would increase this TCE completion rate by 5% at most. See Table 1.
The full dataset on which our analysis is based includes four non-government schools in Tasmania, with ICSEAs ranging from 1020 to 1169. At all levels of ICSEA, the difference between Tasmanian and their interstate similar non-government schools for Year 12 attainment is less than half that for government schools, ranging from 11 to 2%. This difference in our data is consistent with the TASC data just quoted.
As argued publicly in their presentation to the 2015 UTAS Conference Education: Underpinning Social + Economic Transformation by the former Secretary and Deputy Secretary of the Department of Education. Note that this presentation (attended by one of the authors) was not included in the conference proceedings following the Secretary’s departure, but echoes of this blaming the instrument for the measurement can be found in many submissions to the ACER Review.
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*Eleanor Ramsay, Deceased 8 October 2017.
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Rowan, M., Ramsay, E. Educational inequality in Tasmania: evidence and explanations. Aust. Educ. Res. 45, 277–295 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-018-0267-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-018-0267-x