By Jordan Baker
The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank is "profoundly distorting" the final years of school education and students' subject choices, the NSW Education Standards Authority chair Peter Shergold says.
Professor Shergold, who is chairing a national review of senior secondary pathways, wants to keep ATAR. But he said it should be coupled with information about lessons learned outside school, in casual jobs or carer responsibilities as the basis of an "education passport".
Peter Shergold wants the ATAR to be supplemented with a learner profileCredit: Wolter Peeters
He presented his vision of an "education passport that you then take with you through your life" to a webinar held by the Centre for Social Impact at the University of NSW.
The comments come after a draft of the NSW Curriculum Review also proposed scrapping the university entry rank amid concerns from teachers that it encouraged students to pick subjects for their ATAR value.
Professor Shergold's report is due to be presented to the country's education ministers next week. It looks at how to integrate Vocational Education and Training with academic pathways for school leavers.
"In chairing that review, it has become increasingly obvious to me that the way ATAR is presently used in schools is distorting, profoundly distorting, the educational experience," he told the webinar.
"We are the only country I have found in the world which brings it down to a single number, and the difficulty is that is distorting what is happening in the final years of education at schools, and is distorting choices."
Professor Shergold, who is also the chancellor of Western Sydney University, said while pastoral care in schools was better than a decade ago, "the level of career guidance is much worse than it used to be 10 or 15 years ago".
He would like to move to a Higher School Certificate that captured academic results, but also incorporated a learning profile that included lessons from school and outside it. "That too is a way of tackling disadvantage," he said.
"The person who is working shifts at McDonalds is learning a huge amount. The disadvantaged student who is learning to care for their parents is learning a huge amount. The Aboriginal person in a remote community who goes and does secret men's business is learning a huge amount."
The profile formed the basis of an education passport , and would record degrees, diplomas, and workplace experience. "That helps to convey culturally that education is going to be part of your life," he said.
Kim Paino, the general manager of Marketing and Engagement at the Universities Admissions Centre, said it was a great idea to include all facets of a student into a broad portfolio of their achievements.
"But if they're specifically looking to university study that would need to include an academic component," she said. "That can be from an array of things, but what the ATAR brings to that is a comparability that improves academic selection processes."