Every SA public school parent to be surveyed on engagement with their children’s learning
Every parent of a public school student in SA will be surveyed by education department officials as they try to work out how to boost our student’s performance.
SA News
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Every public school parent will be surveyed about their involvement in their children’s learning, as the Education Department flags better engagement with families as the next “big lever” to lifting academic outcomes. And department chief executive Rick Persse says governing councils are an “untapped resource” eager to play a bigger role.
The department last year announced its aim for SA to match the world’s top-performing school systems within a decade. Initiatives include successful rollouts of literacy and numeracy guides and a detailed data “dashboard” for principals, plus a proposal for creating comprehensive curriculum guides across all subjects and year levels.
The state sits at the lower end of the “good” range on the scale developed by global consultancy McKinsey. New data shows SA is improving but will have to accelerate its rate of gain to equal “great” systems, such as Canada, Finland and Estonia, by 2028.
“High-performing systems, high-performing schools, high-performing kids have engaged parents and communities around them. I feel like we can do more in that space,” Mr Persse said, stressing it was about what the department and schools could do to foster parent engagement and not about any parenting “deficit”.
He said schools’ communication with parents was vital, citing a UK study that found one of the most cost-effective measures was sending texts to mums and dads about students’ upcoming tests.
The department’s executive director for system performance, Ben Temperly, said the new survey would gather “consistent levels of information across all schools” about parent engagement, including how schools inform them about kids’ academic progress.
“Once we have that level of understanding … we’ll be able to provide some very tailored and targeted advice around what works,” he said.
A small pilot survey and parent focus groups this year will be followed by the statewide survey next year. It will incorporate the annual parent satisfaction questionnaire that all schools issue under a national agreement.
Mr Persse said a gathering of governing council chairpersons from all over the state had shown they wanted guidance in a range of areas, including “how they can be more useful on student achievement”.
“It’s OK for the governing council to be curious about teaching and learning, not just the canteen and the carpark and the landscaping and the finances and so on,” he said.
While SA trails national results, from 2017-19 it was the biggest improver in several NAPLAN categories, including writing in Years 3, 5 and 9.
About 60 per cent of public schools improved in NAPLAN this year. More than one in five has lifted their results two years running to a level above their decade-long averages.