It’s bonkers to have an educational system that is making half the students mentally unwell

Opinion: If we had a state-sponsored program that made nearly half of its participants sick, we’d stop it in its tracks today and order a Royal Commission.

HSC students sit for exams.

If we had a state-sponsored program that made nearly half of its participants sick, we’d stop it in its tracks today and order a Royal Commission.

And yet with the NSW HSC we continue to tinker at the edges and talk about true reforms taking up to a decade.

A University of NSW study in 2015 found that of the 722 students surveyed, 42% registered high-level anxiety symptoms, high enough to be of clinical concern.

Sure, there have been changes to the NSW HSC over the years, with more emphasis and marks awarded to classwork, assignments and tests in the lead up to the final exams.

But fundamentally it still feels the same.

Perhaps dolling out marks to assignments and tests over the journey of the Year 12 has just elongated the pressure rather than letting out the steam which still builds up at exam time.

Ask any parent who’s had a kid go through HSC and they would be able to tell you a few horror stories.

Ask any ex-student to talk to you about the HSC and tell me they haven’t been traumatised by the event in some way, shape or form.

For the top echelons who sail through it, get a good mark, go on to study what they wanted at uni, good on you, congratulations.

But for the vast majority of students it’s usually not plain sailing.

And that’s a big problem that should be ringing alarm bells.

Reforms to the NSW HSC can’t come quick enough as this archaic system of measuring academic achievement continues to deliver poor mental health outcomes and unfair assessments of a student’s scholastic abilities.

I come from a system of continuous assessment throughout the final two years of schooling, which, by any measure has got to be fairer than a system which favours the student who can ace a test one week and forget most of what they crammed a week later.

In a NSW curriculum review delivered by Professor Geoff Masters last year there are signs that things are about to change in NSW schools.

It recognises there is a “new and urgent challenge for schools” and the school curriculum to ensure that “all students reach levels of attainment currently achieved by only some”.

Central to the new curriculum being developed in the later years is ‘a limited number of rigorous, high quality HSC subjects” with a smaller number of subjects envisaged.

BUT, and it is a big BUT, the report states it could take at least a decade to develop and introduce the entire set of new HSC subjects.

Even then there is no suggestion that the HSC end of year exams will be done away with.

This means the NSW school system, in its current format, is perpetuating a mental heath problem a world weary society is clearly not coping with.