School reporting is squarely on the national agenda. During May, Minister Nelson called on four states to release to parents information from their 2003 literacy tests to be eligible for the $700 voucher for students not achieving the Year 3 reading benchmark.   Public reporting against literacy and numeracy benchmarks is part of Nelson's broader agenda to improve the public reporting of school performances: on the Internet, in school Annual Reports or on 'school signs at the front gate'. The purpose, Nelson says, is to increase the level of information available for parental choice and decision-making, for holding schools accountable and for identifying under-performing schools.   The information made public in these ways would include academic outcomes, school leaver destinations, teacher qualifications, professional development provision, staff and student retention rates and absentee rates.  

In her recent book Schools in the Spotlight, Jennifer Buckingham makes a similar plea for better public information about the performances of Australian schools. While recognising the risks of encouraging unhealthy competition and isolating poorly performing schools, Buckingham sees the masking of 'substandard' school performance as an even greater threat to quality education.  She calls for consistent, fair and meaningful systems of reporting and publishing comparative school performances - systems that would take into account the different socioeconomic and other circumstances in which schools work.

The fact that schools and teachers are prepared to have their work externally scrutinised through schemes such as the National Awards for Quality Schooling, The Australian's Best Schools competition, the National Excellence in Teaching Awards and the Australian Business Excellence Awards is itself an indication of how attitudes toward excellence, recognition, transparency and public accountability have changed within the education profession.   There is now a greater appreciation of the role and necessity of high-quality evidence in informed decision-making and an understanding that parents, school leaders, system managers and the broader profession require sound, dependable evidence to achieve ongoing improvements in learning.

ACER is playing an important role in developing and exploring improved systems for reporting the performances of schools and individual students.

In the area of judging and reporting school performances, ACER has been directly involved in the management of the National Awards for Quality Schooling and the judging for The Australian 's Best Schools awards.   But we also have worked to draw attention to the hazards of simplistic comparisons of school performances.   Schools work in widely different contexts.  They differ in the extent to which they are inclusive rather than selective, in the socioeconomic areas in which they operate, in the language backgrounds of their student intakes, and in the objectives they have for their students.  ACER has pointed out that, at the very least, public comparisons of schools must be broad in their interpretation of success. If they are to be meaningful, school comparisons must take into account the different backgrounds and starting points of students, replacing or supplementing raw results with more sophisticated measures of the value schools add.

In the area of assessing and reporting individual student learning, ACER has been at the forefront of designing improved ways of monitoring and displaying student progress. ACER recently provided key input to a forum organised by the Student Learning Division of the Victorian Department of Education and Training.   That forum was attended by a large and representative group of stakeholders from the Victorian education community.   DET subsequently commissioned ACER's Research Director, Assessment and Reporting, Margaret Forster to develop her forum presentation into a discussion paper for still wider circulation.   The paper discusses the desirability of providing parents with access to web-based information about a child's progress across their years of schooling.

With public reporting clearly on the national agenda, ACER will continue to provide leadership in the development and investigation of more informative ways of reporting student and school performances.

By Professor Geoff Masters, June 2004

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