Kids are back at school for another year of learning and achieving, and for the first time in history, contributing to their schools academic profile on a new national website.
Last week Education Minister Julia Gillard launched the My School website, which is a national database of 10,000 schools ranked on performance.
The My School site is a tool available to parents and students to find out information on a school’s academic performance.
Developed by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, the site
contains information collated from the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), which all students do in years three, five, seven and nine.
Information published on the My School site includes; national testing results, attendance rates, its
rentention to year-12, the numbers of teachers in the school and more.
This allows for comparisons to be made with other schools in the local area, or schools that are statistically similar in other states.
There are concerns that the data available on the website will not offer a true reflection of some schools’ performance due to those schools being disadvantaged in some way, mainly socio-economical.
Macksville’s Adventist School Principal David McNeil said that the concept is good, but thinks there will be issues with the websites use.
“I think it will be used for the wrong reasons,” Mr McNeil said.
“My concern is that it does not take into account the socio-economic standing of individual schools.
“Comparing schools from different socio-economic areas would be like comparing apples to oranges.”
NSW Teachers Federation President Bob Lipscombe said that the data made available on the My School website will lead to the mis-representation of schools.
“Two daily newspapers have already published a ‘league table’ comparing schools, based on the misuse of the national test data available on the site,” Mr Lipscombe said.
“Schools have been reduced to a single, statistically invalid score.
“The NAPLAN tests were never designed for this purpose and are too inaccurate.
“Whether a school is at the top, middle or bottom of the list, public or private, the ranking is invalid.”
Scotts Head Primary School Principal Angie Evans said that the My School site was only one measure of a school’s overall performance.
“The My School website only uses the NAPLAN results to measure a school’s performance,” Mrs Evans said.
“That does not really give an overall view of what we do here at the school.
“We have put a lot of effort into our own website (Scotts Head Primary School), which gives a better idea of the school’s environment.
“There is a link to our website on the My School site, which we would encourage parents and students
to visit.
The My School website is part of the Labor Government’s ‘Education Revolution’, aimed at creating national education standards.
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