‘Boring’ ATAR content ‘has lost appeal for unis and employers’

The NSW Year 12 curriculum is “boringly prescriptive”, according to Briony Scott, head of a leading private school.

Dr Briony Scott.

The NSW Year 12 curriculum is “boringly prescriptive” and prevents schools offering students more diverse pathways to work, according to the principal of a leading private school.

Briony Scott, the head of Wenona School, told a Sydney forum yesterday she was tired of business “mansplaining” what schools should do. Schools had been talking about the need for change for 30 years and it was annoying to be “lectured” by business.

Dr Scott, who is married to Mark Scott, the secretary of the NSW Department of Education, said schools were not the barrier to change. “As soon as you say to me my Year 11 students don’t need to have 12 units and my Year 12 students don’t need to have 10 units, I will change the system,” she said. “I will let them build up portfolios, I will have them working in business two days a week, I will get them into the TAFE system if we can build that up again. We are ready to go. We are not the issue here.”

Dr Scott was speaking at an event organised by the Association of Independent Schools of NSW to launch a report, CEO Perspectives: The Future of Schooling in Australia, prepared by consultants Knowledge ­Society.

She said she was frustrated by the prescriptive nature of the curriculum leading to the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank score used for entry to university. The ATAR had served a purpose “for a season” but the season had changed and employers and universities were already bypassing it in their selection and recruitment.

“We cannot breathe to do our jobs,” she said. “I love academic rigour and learning … but the curriculum is so detailed that we have no choice if we are going to get our students to meet this magic ATAR — which is not magic any more because business and universities are bypassing it.”

She said there was little love of learning possible because of the constraints on teaching outside the curriculum.

“You are treating teachers like children — you must do this, you must do this,” she said. “Heaven forbid if we colour outside the lines. We are not children, even though we work with children. We are specialists in our fields.”

She said schools worked hard to build mastery of content as well as character.

“One hundred per cent of my women do STEM subjects,” she said. “They just can’t get through the flipping engineering degrees at university because of the sexism and they get into a workplace, and they are berated in the media. Women are demeaned and devalued. We would never talk in schools the way parliamentarians speak in parliament. You would never be allowed to.”

NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley told the forum that state governments faced unprece­dented building programs to meet demographic changes. “We have to deliver something like 280,000 additional new school places between now and 2030 in NSW.”

Excerpts from the AISNSW report are available at: theustralian.com.au/the deal