Ann Wason Moore: Behind the OP scores on the Gold Coast

There’s more to the OP statistics than first meets the eye, writes Ann Wason Moore. And it’s not so much about private versus private as it is state versus state school.

HERE’S a scholastic irony … you just about need a university degree to interpret the latest OP results.

While the evergreen debate about public vs private schools rages on, with both pointing to stellar results in the class of 2018, a deep-dive into the data reveals the real battle is state school versus state school.

The key information is not the percentage of students who achieved an OP of 1 to 5, but the percentage of students who actually qualified for an OP.

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The key information is not the percentage of students who achieved an OP of 1 to 5, but the percentage of students who actually qualified for an OP

An alarming number of state schools — schools which performed overwhelmingly well in the rankings of high achievers — had only a pitifully small portion of students actually eligible for an OP.

Here’s a sample comparison taken from the top schools on the Gold Coast: 78.79 per cent of Somerset College students were eligible for an OP, and 38.46 per cent of them scored an OP of 1-5.

That’s a great result — the best in our region.

Should every student receive an OP?

In second position for the Gold Coast was Southport State High School, where only 19.44 per cent of the Year 12 class was eligible for an OP. Of that 19 per cent, 38.1 per cent achieved an OP of 1 to 5.

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Again, a great result … for those who actually received an OP.

Now, should every student receive an OP? Absolutely not.

An Overall Position number is useless if you’re not aiming for a tertiary education; students are far better to receive vocational training if that’s the post-school pathway they desire.

But four out of five students opting out of the OP system altogether seems high.

Four out of five students opting out of the OP system altogether seems high.

What piques my interest is that almost all of the high-performing state schools with low OP participation rates offer exceptional academic excellence programs.

It seems that if you make it into the excellence program then, judging by these OP tables, you receive a free education that’s every bit as good as that offered by private schools — albeit theirs comes with fee levels high enough to make your eyes water.

But if you don’t, well, you either bring the school average down … or you just don’t sit for an OP.

In other words, it’s a two-tiered system within the state system.

And then there are the state schools without any academic excellence programs. Again, trawl through the data and while their OP 1-5 results are lower, the percentage of OP eligible students is higher.

It’s a two-tiered system within the state system, writes Ann Wason Moore.

Perhaps without a stellar reputation to protect, there’s more equal opportunity.

Obviously not every student is going to qualify for an excellence program, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be encouraged to participate in the OP system, which will only broaden their post-secondary school options.

Yes, an OP of 1-5 is great, but an OP of 15 still gets you into a hell of a lot of good university courses.

Yet, anecdotally, I’ve been told by teachers and students alike that this doesn’t necessarily happen.

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Instead, some students are actively advised to opt out of the assessment, while high-performance students are poached from other catchment areas to boost numbers and results.

It’s a game the private schools have long been accused of playing, excluding those who don’t perform well enough and stealing students courtesy of scholarships and grants in order to increase their academic rank.

Now their own best students are being pilfered by state schools who can offer great results for free.

Interestingly, the OP participation rate for our private schools, on average, is more than 70 per cent. Maybe you do get what you pay for?

Statistics and data never tell the full story of the education offered by any institution, but, as parents, we need something to work with to inform our decisions when it comes to choosing schools.

My advice would be don’t just look at the results, but look at how inclusive those results are.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that excluding the non-elite achievers is a big fat fail.