My School website to be enhanced to give 'more rounded picture' of schools
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Version 0 of 1. The My School website is to be overhauled to allow new types of comparisons between Australian schools and greater access to the underlying data. The federal government wants to enable consumer website-style comparisons based on factors selected by users, broadening the existing benchmarks that determine similar school communities based on parents’ employment and educational advantage. The government also plans to provide “a more rounded picture of a school” including details about extracurricular activities, student support services and connections with the local community. The education minister, Christopher Pyne, will seek approval from his state and territory counterparts for the changes, which flow from a government-commissioned review of the website. The site, launched in 2010, allows parents to access data on about 9,500 schools, including their finances, the number of teachers employed, how many senior secondary certificates were awarded, and post-school destination outcomes. My School has long been a point of controversy among teachers and education experts because it contains performance data from national literacy and numeracy (Naplan) test results, which are used to compare schools. People can look at a school’s average Naplan scores and how they compare with schools serving students from statistically similar backgrounds – an exercise that is fraught with difficulty. The review’s report, released on Sunday, said a lot of the sensitivity about My School related to concerns about the Naplan data “being misinterpreted or used for unproductive purposes, such as development of ‘league tables’, which can draw inappropriate comparisons between schools”. “The website has been designed to try to overcome these problems, often at the expense of useability,” an educational consultant, Grahame Cook, wrote in his review. “A related issue is the interpretation of ‘similar’ schools, which are based on schools having students with statistically similar background, known as the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage.” This index takes into account students’ family backgrounds – such as parents’ occupation and education – and school-level factors, such as geographical location and the proportion of Indigenous students. The report said the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority had put “substantial effort into improving this index to make it more robust and stable over time” but it was “not designed to capture the qualitative factors that influence parents and school communities’ perceptions about their school”. In a formal response to the review, the government said it wanted to add information to help parents understand the data on My School and give them the ability to compare schools based on new criteria. The government said: “The review suggests that the ability to either self-select schools to compare or to choose other characteristics for the comparison (e.g. single-sex, selective, comprehensive, size, financials) would be welcomed by both parents and principals.” The government said schools should also be able to add more information about themselves, such as extracurricular activities, which did not need to be nationally comparable. Other new indicators would include “reporting on the numbers of students who achieve minimum standards in year 12, tertiary entrance score information, information about the proportions of teachers at each level of expertise and information on parent, student and staff satisfaction”. The Greens senator Penny Wright raised concern that the new comparative features could create unfair contrasts and involve “comparing apples with oranges and coming up with bananas”. “The My School site has already introduced a competitive element which is damaging student and teacher wellbeing and distorting our idea of what matters in education,” she said. “This is only going to get worse if we stop comparing like with like. It will increase the hype around Naplan – upping the pressure on teachers and students.” Pyne said the government was “committed to My School as a valuable resource for schools and parents”. “We want to make the site even easier to use and understand, giving parents more options for comparing different schools, and providing a greater focus on students’ progress,” he said. |