Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We in Queensland continue to work very hard on better elucidating the progress that schools are achieving. This is a very important metric that is currently submerged in very basic My School data which is available but which for many Australians is quite hard to read and digest. More importantly, within the state education system it does not really promote a great deal of information apart from very coarse data around the proportion of OPs of a particular rank, which does not help much if you are constantly changing the denominator—that is, the number of students who complete year 12 with an OP qualification.

In Queensland, around half of all students are getting an OP. In fact, more than half of them do not. More than half of them now get a vocational qualification or a certificate of education and take a vocational pathway. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but we do not want to be advantaging schools who put through small numbers of OP students but can crow about those OP students doing very well if it is a far smaller proportion than you would expect from a school of that socioeconomic background.

With the help of a number of people in my electorate, such as Kari Stuart, and with the help of others such as Chris Giuliano from the Parliamentary Library—we are grateful for his assistance—we are now starting to be able to produce high-quality graphics, with more of them released today. Well beyond my electorate now, I am glad to say that any part of Queensland can now be the only part of Australia that can really get a clear picture of the progress that students are achieving between years 9 and 12. This is the great black hole of progress between the last NAPLAN test and graduation from senior school.

Other states do have ATAR data. Of course, this itself is not a full picture of how students are progressing. But ATAR data is becoming increasingly difficult to access for research purposes. There is no real privacy concern there. So we should be able to see the ATAR data as a school mean figure and the distribution around that mean, just as a basic measure of how the student journey has gone through to year 12. We have four NAPLAN tests—in years 3, 5, 7 and 9—but we cannot really track the movement except with fairly small selections of students who sat both tests, and only between two NAPLAN tests, not the third and fourth ones. In K-12 schools you have a great opportunity to watch that journey students embark upon over time.

We should increasingly be recognising the schools that are doing this well. The message from my research is that public schools do this absolutely, as well as independent and GPS schools. But the great reluctance by educators to support this kind of data, for fear of embarrassing those who are not performing, actually punishes those who are performing. Those who are doing an extraordinary job on taking children on these journeys through to senior need to be recognised. Increasingly, this data will become publicly available and those educators and principals will be recognised.