Education Department plan to place SA schools with world’s best systems within a decade
EVERY public school has been rated on academic results — both current and over time — and placed on a five-level improvement scale, as the Education Department launches an overhaul aimed at matching the best school systems in the world within a decade.
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EVERY public school has been rated on its academic results — both current and over time — and placed on a five-level improvement scale, as the Education Department launches an overhaul aimed at matching the best school systems in the world within a decade.
The department spent more than $1 million engaging global consultancy McKinsey on a plan to measure school performance in order to better tailor support to each one.
Schools initially have been rated using formulas that take into account the NAPLAN and SACE results of every student with other measures to be added as the scheme is refined.
Schools’ “trajectory” of improvement — or otherwise — over recent years also has been measured, recognising that those in lower socio-economic areas with middling academic scores might be big improvers, while schools in wealthier areas with high scores could be coasting.
The “stage of improvement” assigned to each school is determined by a combination of its academic scores and its improvement trajectory.
McKinsey has a universal scale for comparing whole education systems based on international test results and placed SA’s public system within its “good” range, albeit at the lower end of that range. Finland and Canada are among nations in the “great” range. No system is yet ranked as “excellent”.
Education Department chief executive Rick Persse said such a “frank assessment” had shown that to match the world’s best within 10 years “we need to accelerate growth for every child, in every class, in every school”.
“We need to be improving at twice the rate we are improving at the moment,” Mr Persse told The Advertiser. “This is a pretty seismic shift in terms of what we are doing in school improvement systemically. Our ambition is to be a great system, a world-class system.”
He said it was not just about raising the results of struggling students.“We haven’t been stretching our middle kids, we haven’t been stretching our kids at the top end,” he said.
Mr Persse said the new approach recognised that an increase in accountability had to be accompanied by an increase in support for schools. It comes after the national release of NAPLAN results this week showed SA made modest gains but was still the weakest of the mainland states, recording results below national averages in every test at every year level.
The five “stages of improvement” into which schools have been placed are, from lowest to highest, “build foundations”, “maintain momentum”, “shift gear”, “stretch”, and “inspire”.
Principals will be supplied with resources in September including literacy and numeracy guides with the best strategies that correspond to their school’s “stage”, helping them to develop their own three-year improvement plans from 2019-21. Support will also come in the form of new and more targeted professional development options for teachers and school leaders.
The department is not releasing details of what stage each school is at, or the numbers of schools placed in each one, but principals will be free to communicate their stages with their communities.
The new system also includes school improvement “dashboards”, which are personalised, interactive web pages for principals. The dashboards allow them to track academic achievement, student wellbeing using measures such as wellbeing surveys and attendance data, and “organisational health” based on staff and parent surveys.
The dashboard data can be filtered by year level, gender, Aboriginal status and disability, and can be broken down to the individual student level.
While the McKinsey investigation was instigated by the department under the former Labor government, the resulting plan has the support of Education Minister John Gardner.
“Importantly, this approach is evidence-based and data-driven, and has been informed by the experience and knowledge of South Australian school leaders who have been successful in lifting student achievement levels and school performance,” he said.