MCEETYA Meeting

Communiqué, MCEETYA, 17 April 2009; Media Release, The Hon Peter Garrett MP, 17 April 2009; The Australian, 17 April 2009; The Australian, 17 April 2009; The Advertiser, 18 April 2009; The Age, 18 April 2009; The Australian, 18 April 2009; Courier Mail, 18 April 2009; Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 2009

Last week’s Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) meeting in Adelaide has agreed to include the arts and music in the national curriculum. The meeting of all state, territory and Australian Government Education Ministers agreed that music, visual arts and the performing arts would all be included in the second stage of national curriculum development, alongside geography and languages.

MCEETYA also agreed to establish a framework for the publication of school performance information that would enable the public to access nationally consistent information on schools’ results, workforce, financial resources and student population.

A website will be created that will permit the public to compare the student characteristics, test results and sources of income of schools. Every school in Australia will have a page on the website with links to its own website and other information.

The page will outline information regarding the school environment, the school type, teacher and student numbers, levels of teacher professional accreditation, Year 12 completion and tertiary entrance results, vocational education and training participation, literacy and numeracy standards, parent, student and teacher satisfaction surveys and sources of school income. Parents will be able to compare the performance of ‘like schools’ as well as groups of ‘like students’ within different schools.

The Australian Government Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, Ms Julia Gillard, emphasised once again that the Australian Government remained committed to transparent reporting of school results and characteristics, but insisted that it would not compile ‘simplistic league tables’.

Instead, Minister Gillard argued that schools should be required to provide ‘sophisticated data’ that enable comparisons between ‘groups of like schools’ and which ensured that schools remained accountable. Minister Gillard also called for the publication of student results on a sector basis, to enable comparisons between the performance of Catholic, government and independent schools.

The MCEETYA Communiqué argued that the publication of school performance information would ‘support accountability, school evaluation, collaborative policy development and resource allocation’ and announced that the requirements would apply to both government and non-government schools. The Communiqué also stated that ‘through better monitoring of performance at the student, school and system level, educational outcomes can be lifted across all schools’.

In response to the announcement, the Chief Executive of AISV, Ms Michelle Green, indicated that Victorian independent schools would cooperate with the process, but called for MCEETYA to ensure that published data was truly comparable. The Australian Education Union also called for the introduction of legislation to prevent the ‘misuse’ of school performance data.

 

 

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