Labor to focus on progress over ‘blunt’ school report cards

School report cards that grade students from A to E could be confined to the history books if Labor is elected.

Traditional school report cards may be on the way out.

School report cards that grade students from A to E could be confined to the history books after the Labor Party pledged to create a system of student assessment ­focusing on progress over achieve­ment if elected.

Revealing support for a key recommendation of the recent Gonski review into education excellence in Australian schools, Labor education spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek has also endorsed its contentious push for a greater focus in the curriculum of the general capabilities — often dubbed 21st-century skills — such as resilience, collaboration, creativity and problem-solving.

Ms Plibersek said she was committed to rejuvenating the Melbourne Declaration on educational goals, struck in 2008 and signed by education ministers around the country, “and we will have ­detailed state-by-state progress targets and goals to drive change in our school system”.

“Overall, Australia has a high-performing school system,” she said at an event at Sydney’s McKell Institute yesterday. “But we should aspire to do better.

“My fundamental proposition is that we must change our school system to focus on progress over time — progress of individual students, progress of schools and progress of states and education systems.”

Ms Plibersek said the Gonski report’s proposition, that each child should achieve at least one year’s learning for every year of education, put forward by John Hattie of the Melbourne ­Graduate School of Education, seemed simple and straightforward but there was underlying complexity.

Currently there was no agreed conception of what progress looked like or how to measure it, she said.

If elected, Labor planned to ­appoint a panel of principals and teachers with experience in using progress measures and tools to lead the process of putting progress at the centre of education.

“I will also ask this group of principals and teachers to consider whether we need to focus more on progress in school ­reports, rather than the more blunt A to E measure that we use now,” she said.

Australian Education Union president Correna Haythorpe welcomed Labor’s announcement of a panel.

“This puts teachers and principals at the heart of the conversation,” Ms Haythorpe said.

Megan O’Connell, director of the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University, said any revisiting of the Melbourne Declaration should apply to the whole education system.

Dr O’Connell said governments needed to work with early childhood services, schools and vocational and higher education institutions to determine what success looked like at each stage of learning and how it should be measured.

“What children learn before and after school matters just as much as what they learn in school,” she said.

Ms Plibersek’s speech was Labor’s first detailed response to the Gonski report, which was published in March.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called the Gonski report a landmark document and supported its recommendations.