Labor to investigate scrapping traditional A to E school report cards

Federal Labor will investigate scrapping traditional school report cards that grade students from A to E if elected.

Labor’s education spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek has committed to establishing a panel of principals and teachers to examine ways to better measure student progress.

Federal Labor will investigate scrapping traditional school report cards that grade students from A to E if elected, with education spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek committing to establishing a panel of leading principals and teachers to examine ways to better measure student progress.

Revealing support for a key recommendation to come out of the recent Gonski review into education excellence in Australian schools, Ms Plibersek also endorsed the 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.

Speaking at an event at Sydney’s McKell Institute this morning, Ms Plibersek said Labor was committed to rejuviating the Melbourne Declaration on education, struck in 2008 and signed by a 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. “But we should aspire to do better. My fundamental proposition is that we must change our school system to focus on progres over time — progress of individual students, progress of schools and progress of states and education systems.”

Ms Plibersek said that the Gonski report’s proposition, that each child should achieve at least one year’s learning for every year of education, put forward by Professor John Hattie of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, seemed simple and straighforward 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, adding that it would “give a more accurate measurement of change over time than achievement-only measures”.

Ms Plibersek’s speech was Labor’s first detailed response to the Gonski report, which was published in March. It also coincides with the recent release ofterms of reference for NSW’s upcoming curriculum review.

Lifting education standards has been subject to widespread debate in recent years amid Australia’s declining performance in several interenational surveys. The 2018 NAPLAN results confirmed that, in most literacy and numeracy categories, student performance had not markedly improved since testing began.