Privileged schools’ NAPLAN results don’t look so good when compared fairly to poorer ones

SOME highly disadvantaged country public schools do better at NAPLAN than the highest fee Adelaide private schools. Here’s how they do it.

FLINDERS View Primary is a public school in Port Augusta West. It’s quite small, with 180 students, of whom more than 70 per cent are indigenous.

The State Government ­places the school in its worst category of educational dis­advantage.

Fewer than 40 per cent of students manage to reach the attendance benchmark of nine out of every 10 school days.

About 300km away, Prince Alfred College is a prestigious all-boys school with 1100-odd students on the fringe of the Adelaide CBD in Kent Town, charging more than $26,000 for Year 12 fees this year.

The proportion of students who reach the same attendance benchmark is 90 per cent.

Which of the two schools records better NAPLAN results?

Flinders View.

It’s counterintuitive, but it’s true. How?

First, a quick refresher on NAPLAN. Students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are tested in five domains — reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy.

So there are 20 categories, or 15 for primary schools.

In raw scores, Prince Alfred College is, of course, streets ahead.

According to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s MySchool website, PAC students achieved “substantially above” Australian average scores in three categories in 2017, “above” average in 10 and “close to” average in seven.

By contrast, Flinders View recorded results “substantially below” Australian averages in all 15 categories in which its students were tested.

But it is hardly surprising that students from advantaged backgrounds outperform those from disadvantaged ones on such an unsophisticated measure.

So MySchool provides a more meaningful way of measuring school performance through its “index of community socio-educational advantage”, allowing comparisons of similar schools.

That’s where Flinders View turns the tables.

The index takes into account parents’ occupations and education levels, schools’ geographical locations and their proportion of indigenous students. Parental wealth and school resources are not considered.

In a scale ranging from 500 to 1300 with a median of 1000, Flinders View’s index rating is 749 and PAC’s is 1144.

The MySchool site offers comparisons of each school to the average NAPLAN scores of up to 60 “similar” schools around the country, based on their index values.

On that measure, both Flinders View and PAC score “close to” the average in eight categories.

But while Flinders View is above average in three and below in two, PAC is below average in 11 and substantially below in one.

This is not about picking on PAC, as there is nothing especially unusual about the school in this regard.

To take some other examples of high-fee independent schools, Walford is substantially above the national average in 19 out of 20 categories, yet not above average in any category against similar schools.

It struggles in three of the four numeracy categories, particularly so in Year 9. Other girls’ schools — Wilderness, Seymour and St Peter’s Girls — have similar numeracy deficiencies against like schools.

In a co-ed example, Scotch College does no better than “close to” average in any category against like schools. In Year 9, it is substantially below in three and below in the other two.

Well-known Catholic schools are no different. Cabra couldn’t crack an above-average result compared to similar schools. Neither could Christian Brothers College, which was below average in every Year 9 category.

Loreto delivered a better but still mixed bag, with more below-average than above-average comparisons.

And what about those high-performing eastern suburbs public primary schools that parents scramble to get their kids into?

The example most often held up is Linden Park.

Against like schools, it’s above average in one instance — Year 3 spelling — and close to average in all 14 others.

Fine, but hardly stellar.

Rose Park Primary had a single highlight in Year 3 grammar and punctuation, but its Year 7s struggled across the board against similar schools.

Again, this is not a campaign against any of the schools named here — bear in mind that all of them generally smash national average raw scores.

And it’s easy to find disadvantaged schools that also fail to match up to ones with students of similar background.

Part of the story is that South Australia is an overall underperformer against other states in raw NAPLAN scores, so it stands to reason that many of our schools will struggle on any comparative basis that involves schools from over the border. But that’s not the whole story.

Canberra schools have always been national leaders in raw NAPLAN results, yet an ACT Auditor-General’s report last year found that, despite high funding rates, the territory’s schools were performing worse than equivalent schools elsewhere.

Which goes to show that looking at raw NAPLAN scores is a poor way of evaluating any school.

Comparisons with similar schools at least offer a fairer perspective, and MySchool also offers data on student gains between tests and breakdown of school scores into various “bands” of achievement.

But as any principal will say, you’ll still learn more about a school by actually visiting it than by any amount of poring over test scores.