By Alex Crowe
Box Hill Senior Secondary College has emerged as the state’s most improved public school for VCE results, after students boosted their median scores by 17 per cent over the past five years.
Other standout government schools, in an analysis of VCE results between 2020 and 2024, included Woodmans Hill Secondary College in Ballarat East and Officer Secondary College in Melbourne’s south-east with performance improvements of 13 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively.
Box Hill Senior Secondary College principal Warren Dawson with the school’s student leaders.Credit: Eddie Jim
In the independent sector, Heritage College, a Christian co-ed school with several campuses in Melbourne’s east and south-east, has improved its median VCE subject study score from 21 in 2020 to 27 in 2024, a gain of 29 per cent.
Two schools in the city’s west – Al-Taqwa College, an Islamic co-educational school in Truganina, and Tarneit’s Good News Lutheran College – also made the list of the private sector’s big improvers.
Al-Taqwa students went from a median study score of 27 in 2020 to 34 in 2024, and their counterparts at Good News improved their median achievement from 26 in 2020 to 31 in 2024.
Study scores are measured out of 50, and a 30 is the average, putting a student scoring that benchmark in the top half of VCE performers.
Maths and science subjects are usually scaled up, arts subjects are scaled down, and English and business subjects normally remain the same.
Ballarat Clarendon College – Victoria’s highest performing VCE school for each of the past three years – achieved a median study score of 37 in 2024. The private school has employed specialist maths teachers starting at primary level for more than a decade.
Box Hill Senior Secondary College, where the students’ median VCE study score went from a low of 24 in 2020 to a high of 28 in 2024, had to overcome a period of turmoil to achieve the standout results.
An Education Department intervention led to a range of recommendations to improve outcomes and a new executive principal, Warren Dawson, was deployed in 2019 to help turn things around at the school’s Mont Albert campus.
Dawson said he and his staff scoured student data to find key learning areas to focus on, hired consultants to examine the school’s processes, embarked on a program to train teachers and importantly, listened to students’ views about the future of their school.
“When I first arrived, student leadership was very hit or miss,” he said.
“We now have a formal student leadership program and all those students receive training … they’re small things, but they add to the bigger picture.”
In addition to the traditional VCE, Box Hill offers students alternative pathways for finishing school, including the VCE Vocational Major and Victorian Pathways Certificate programs, which cater to the growing number of students opting out of receiving an ATAR.
University of Melbourne research has found about 40 per cent of Australian students finish secondary school without obtaining an ATAR.
Dawson said Box Hill had not been immune to the teacher shortage that has plagued most Australian schools, and absenteeism – which remains well-above pre-COVID levels – remained a challenge.
In 2024, Victorian public school students missed an average of 25 days of school, slightly more than their peers at Catholic and independent schools.
Dawson said this year’s year 12 students had “been through the meat grinder” as the cohort who began year 7 as COVID hit, so working on resilience had been an important aspect of boosting academic performance.
“When you’re knee-deep in the improvement project you don’t come up for air enough to kind of go, ‘OK, how far have we come?’” he said.
“At the end of last year we had a special briefing for staff once the VCE result had come in and acknowledged the achievement. It was just a great sense of relief.”
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