HANSARD
SITTING CALENDAR
SEARCH
LIVE BROADCAST
Hansard Dynamic Member Index
Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2008-05-07 Daily Xml
Contents
Pdf Xml

Parliamentary Committees

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE: SOUTH AUSTRALIAN CERTIFICATE OF EDUCATION

Adjourned debate on motion of Hon. I.K. Hunter:

That the report of the committee, on its inquiry into the South Australian Certificate of Education, be noted.

(Continued from 9 April 2008. Page 2353.)

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (20:24): I am keen to speak to this motion because only today in The Advertiser there is a story about the recent release of an assessment paper by the Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia about the Future SACE here in South Australia.

At the outset, I want to congratulate my colleague the Hon. Stephen Wade for his minority report on the investigation by the Social Development Committee and, in particular, the reservations that he and his colleagues in the other house expressed on the issue of assessment in relation to the Future SACE.

I indicate that the strong views that I want to express are my personal views. I do not profess that they are the views of my party in relation to the concerns I have and continue to have about the direction of change that we are seeing in our senior secondary assessment system. I make these comments on the basis of having been a shadow minister for education for seven years and then a minister for education for four years and, since that period for the last 10 or 11  years, I have maintained an ongoing and abiding interest in education issues, in particular the issues as they relate to the senior secondary certificate. Further, through my work in the education area, I have maintained a close network of teachers, principals and educators, together with parents and students with some knowledge of the South Australian Certificate of Education.

The assessment system we currently have, the South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE), is simply that year 11 is based on school assessment done by teachers within the school, and at year 12 (there is a third category) you have broadly school-assessed subjects, or SACE subjects, and other subjects which are generally a combination of school assessment and external assessment where the external assessment is by and large the use of public examinations.

In some cases, such as English studies, there is particular project work that must be undertaken but generally there is a combination of public exams and school assessment. This has come from a situation many years ago where year 12 subjects were essentially all publicly-examined subjects and you then had separate school-assessed subjects. There has been a long campaign against examinations on the basis that it is unfair to assess students in that particular way and that it does disadvantage some students.

That long campaign over a number of decades has led to those year 12 subjects moving from being 100 per cent publicly examined down to the situation where, at best in my terms, you have a 50 per cent public exam component and a 50 per cent school-assessed component. Some of them only have a 30 per cent public exam component and, as I say, even more subjects these days have no publicly-examined component at all. That is the current situation.

I also want to congratulate Lucy Hood, who is the education writer for The Advertiser, particularly for her front-page exclusive on 17 April 2008: 'Year 11 made easy'. Lucy Hood, in The Advertiser, had thecourage (thefirst I have seen in many years) to challenge what I will refer to as the conspiracy of silence and the climate of denial that exists within our education system in relation to some of the problems and challenges with which, I believe, we are being confronted. The article from Lucy Hood states:

Year 11 teachers are being encouraged to make subjects easier for students to pass so their schools do not appear to perform poorly in comparison with others. A memo from [a western suburbs] high school reveals that teachers are modifying subjects to include fewer assignments and in some cases no classes...The Woodville High School memo states that students undertaking the modified subjects are not required to attend classes, only have to complete the easiest assignments for the subject despite other students completing up to seven tasks, and only need a 15 per cent grade to gain a Recorded Achievement.

The memo states:

As a school, we need to ensure that our students are not disadvantaged when compared to...schools across the state. Currently, we are allocating a lot more RAs (recorded achievement) and R&Ms (requirements not met).

The modified course only needs to contain one assessment task (maybe the easiest one). The student only needs to get 50 per cent to get an SA (satisfactory achievement) or 15 per cent to get an RA (recorded achievement). It's that easy!

Lucy Hood is highlighting the circumstances in one particular school, as part of the current SACE for year 11 students, and that particular school is saying, 'Look, we've got too many students who are not performing up to the level of other schools.' The way around that is not to lift the educational performance of those particular students but to construct a new assessment program which means, in essence, as this memo says, that these students in this particular school for those particular subjects need not necessarily attend classes; they only have to do one particular assignment task, which will be the easiest and, as long as they get a 15 per cent grade, they can get a recorded achievement.

From discussions I have had with parents, principals and teachers, that appears to be just one example of very many examples that Lucy Hood and others are able to refer to within our school system at the moment. Since that article appeared a number of teachers and principals have indicated to me that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There is widespread rorting of the South Australian Certificate of Education in South Australia.

I can give examples where the situation in some secondary schools is such that, if a teacher wants to assess a student on the basis of performance as 'requirement not met' (that is, the lowest level under the current system at year 11), that teacher is not entitled, allowed or permitted to assess the student in that way until he or she goes to the deputy principal and justifies why a 'requirement not met' is being given to the particular student. That is done on the basis that the school (and the deputy principal, undertaking it on behalf of the school) is desperate to ensure that there are not too many students being classified as 'requirement not met'—the lowest level of classification at year 11.

Under the current system there is widespread rorting. I am not suggesting that it is occurring at all schools but it is certainly occurring at a significant number of schools. There is a conspiracy of silence about problems with the current SACE. One of the challenges that is confronting teachers at the moment (and I have a good deal of sympathy for them) is that government policy required a number of young people to stay in school until the age of 16, when they did not want to be there. Now, of course, the government requires further numbers of young people, up to the age of 17, to stay on at school unless they go on to get a TAFE certificate or something else like that.

Teachers are being confronted with young men and women, young adults aged 16 and 17, who have no interest at all in being within the school environment; have no interest at all in turning up to classes; and have no interest at all in undertaking a range of assessment measures and tasks that the rest of the students in that particular cohort are being required to do.

What is occurring within schools is what Lucy Hood has identified in relation to Woodville High School. I am not singling out Woodville High School, because the point I am making is that it is just one example of very many examples that can be given. Teachers in schools are now saying, 'Okay, we are going to have to respond to this by, in essence, dumbing down the SACE at that particular level and, also, by constructing an assessment program that virtually anybody can get through.'

There are some aspects of the changes in the Future SACE which, on the surface of it in relation to stage 1 or year 11, I do support. As a result of federal government policy (both the former federal government and the current federal government), there will be a requirement to put in grade levels of A through to E, but let me assure members that at year 11 level, if the issue is left (as it will be) to teachers and to schools, there will inevitably be the pressure for modification of what on earth an A, a B and a C actually means in relation to some subjects. There will be assessment programs which will have to be modified to try to ensure that significant numbers of these young people are given the A, B or C grades.

There are also, as the minister has indicated on a number of occasions, some claims in relation to a requirement for students to pass English and maths. In essence, the document released in the past week indicates that evidently it is really literacy and numeracy in some form from a range of English and maths courses. That will mean that there will be the normal range of maths courses ranging down through to what I might politely call basic maths—it has a number of other titles, but let me call it basic maths—which will be modelled along the line of this assessment program that Lucy Hood has referred to at Woodville High School, to ensure that virtually anybody who attends a class will be able to undertake perhaps one particular assessment task, and will be able to be assessed as having met the requirements of the first level, stage 1—year 11—of the South Australian Certificate of Education.

Another part of the current problem with SACE at the moment—and I referred earlier to the conspiracy of silence—is that there is also widespread cheating occurring as a result of the greater concentration on the use of school assessed subjects—that is, essays and assignments being completed by students in their own time and in their own environment, such as at home and away from the school place.

There are many examples that I place on the public record of other students or older students doing assignments for students in the South Australian Certificate of Education. In a small number of cases those students are being paid for the work that they undertake on behalf of other students. There are many examples of parents—well intentioned perhaps—undertaking assignments and completing assignments on behalf of their children, as they see their children stressing out and struggling to complete the requirements of the South Australian Certificate of Education.

There are very many examples of plagiarism, obviously now, with the wonderful technology of the Internet and computers in almost every home, being able to download massive texts and passages from texts from all around the world in relation to whatever particular assignment students have either been given or are undertaking for themselves. This is an issue—and I will refer to it later—which is already being confronted in universities, as universities have to increasingly employ sophisticated software, which seeks to recognise downloaded tracts of text from Internet sites in assessment works being submitted by university students towards their university qualifications. We had exactly the same problem within our South Australian Certificate of Education.

There are also a small number of examples—certainly not to the degree of the other three categories I have referred to—of inappropriate or excessive assistance being provided by teachers to particular students. The South Australian Certificate of Education makes quite clear the extent of assistance that can be provided by a teacher to students in relation to the completion of assessment tasks within the South Australian Certificate of Education. However, there is a small number of examples where inappropriate or excessive assistance is being provided by teachers to students. They are just four of the general categories of what I have referred to as widespread cheating which is occurring currently within our Future South Australian Certificate of Education.

I move now to the grave concerns that I have for the Future SACE. That is occurring within the current climate, where the reliance on public exams has been downgraded a bit but, nevertheless, it still exists, and with the Future SACE, where very significant changes are about to be imposed on our schools. As I will refer to later, one of those changes will be a significant downgrading in the importance of public examinations as part of the year 12 assessment tasks. The document which has been released in the last few days by the Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia and which was referred to in The Advertiser article today highlights some of the details of what the government proposes.

As I speak to this motion tonight, I predict that we are seeing the sowing of the seeds of destruction of the credibility of the South Australian Certificate of Education by the changes that are about to be imposed. In my view, we are seeing the sowing of the seeds of an educational disaster which will roll out over the coming decade or so. Again, I believe we will see what we have seen for some time: a conspiracy of silence in relation to these issues, because it is in no-one's interests within the education sector to bell the cat, to blow the whistle and to highlight particular concerns on these issues.

The problem that we have within education when we talk about predictions of educational disasters is that these things do not happen overnight. It is not like a drought, where all of a sudden the rain stops and the crops dry out and, within the space of six or 12 months, you can see the disaster that unfolds as the implications of that roll through the countryside, through the city and through the nation.

That is not what occurs with major educational change. We have seen fads and phases over the past decades: the open plan classrooms; experimentation with every teacher in the classrooms; and, in essence, the structure that used to be provided decades ago to individual classroom teachers being removed in terms of what is taught in the syllabus and documents that are provided to classroom teachers. Each teacher was allowed to develop their own courses and frameworks.

After 30 or 40 years (from the 70s through to now)—and I give credit to the former federal Liberal government for the past five years, and the current federal Labor government is at least talking the same language at this stage—we are moving away from that particular fad or experiment. It has been about 20 years since we moved away from the open plan classroom philosophy. In relation to curriculum and syllabus, we are now moving to the stage where everyone is saying, 'What we did for the last 30 years was wrong. We were leaving the poor teacher in the classroom—everywhere over the nation—to develop their own syllabus, documents, course outlines and class work, and everyone was doing something different.'

When we look back on it now, we say, 'How silly was it?' but, at the time, the educational philosophy was in vogue and everyone was pushing down that particular path. We are seeing with the changes being imposed at the moment—as I said, almost without comment from the Social Development Committee, with the exception of Dr Rod Crewther from the University of Adelaide—little comment in terms of expressing concern.

Normally, on a range of educational issues—it does not matter what you pick—strong and divergent views will be expressed, because it is not always black or white or right or wrong. People have strongly differing views. But there is an inevitable and inexorable pressure within the system—a conspiracy of silence—which, in my view, in essence, is quietening what ought to be an open debate about the problems we currently have and the direction in which we are heading, with no-one—with the exception of Dr Crewther—being prepared to speak out. It will perhaps attract criticism, but let us get the debate going in relation to whether or not what is occurring is right.

I cannot prove tonight that my views are any more right than the views of the minister and the others. In the end, it will be the passage of time—10 or 15 years—that will prove what is right. As I stand here tonight, I predict that in 10 or 15 years' time many of us will look back on this experiment in relation to the Future SACE—the downgrading of the importance of public examinations and the increasing importance of school-based assessment—and we will say that we got it wrong and that it has been a major problem.

A future minister or government will have to conduct a review and, inevitably, we will move back (as we have with earlier experiments in relation to teachers undertaking all their coursework themselves in the classroom) to a situation where there will have to be greater concentration on public exams and assessment methods that require the undertaking of coursework under the supervision of teachers in schools, rather than at home with the assistance of parents, other students, older brothers and sisters, etc.

As I said earlier, the Future SACE changes refer to up to 30 per cent external assessment. As she has been with many other things, the minister has been very clever with the use of language. In relation to the debate about assessment, she says, 'We are introducing external assessment for the first time into all subjects at year 12,' and everyone assumes that an external assessment is public examination.

On page 6 of a consultation paper released in the last few days by the Senior Secondary Assessment Board, entitled Assessment Performance Standards and Moderation, it states that external assessment is not just public examination (and I will not go through all the detail) but includes written examinations, oral assessments, performance (which could be group performance or solo performance), design requirements, supervised assessment, a product (that is, design requirements, submissions, etc.), or online examinations.

So, the document indicates that external assessment is not what people suspect it may be, that is, public examinations. I have expressed the views of Professor Alan Reid, who was the educational leader of the Success for All committee that opposed basic skills testing in the nineties when we introduced it. He has been the educational grunt behind these changes willingly taken up by minister Lomax-Smith.

By using the phrase 'external assessment', the hidden agenda behind all this is a sneaky way of seeing over the next five to 10 years an inevitable further significant reduction in the use of public exams in year 12. The Success for All document states:

External assessment does not simply equate with written three-hour examinations, which are only one form of external assessment. There are any number of ways in which students can demonstrate their learning to 'outsiders' that can be more closely linked to the learning. It can include performance, vivas, project or artefact production, physical skills tests, and presentation of a portfolio of work to a community meeting or roundtable gathering; and it can happen at any time during the learning process.

The very strong cautionary note I express tonight is also backed up by what I referred to late last year and refer to again, namely, the evidence of what is occurring in other parts of the world. There are a number of examples, but I will talk about what is happening in the United Kingdom.

As I have indicated before, the head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in the United Kingdom, Dr Ken Boston, is a former chief executive of the South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services. He was appointed by a Liberal and a Labor government to head up the education department in New South Wales, and he is now the head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in the United Kingdom.

On 11 July last year, Ken Boston was interviewed in relation to the major controversial changes that were being implemented by him in the United Kingdom. He said:

As with many top education bureaucrats across the globe, Boston is fighting on several fronts to contain the insidious influence of the internet on coursework that students often claim as their own. From next year awarding bodies, the equivalent of state examination boards, will be using the same sort of software used by universities to catch cheats. But plagiarism is not the only problem thrown up by allowing students to complete work outside a controlled environment, Boston says. Helpful relatives pose almost as big a threat. The QCA used a polling company to speak to a wide range of people, including parents, about their input into assignments that were being used to assess students for their GCSEs—

that is the General Certificate of Secondary Education—

We found that there was, I guess it is not too strong a word to say, some abuse in relation to coursework being done by relatives, Boston says. In fact, 8 per cent of the parents interviewed confirmed that they had contributed quite significantly to their children's equivalent to the South Australian Certificate of Education. With coursework accounting for up to 40 per cent of the mark in some courses—and GCSEs being used to help determine if a student will proceed to an A-level course and possibly university—it was a problem that could no longer be ignored.

In a letter from Dr Boston in April 2006 to the then education secretary, the minister for education, Ruth Kelly, he said:

We recognise that the practice of students carrying out coursework at home and the wide availability of the internet have created greater opportunities for malpractice. This gives problems with ensuring authenticity—the extent to which we can be confident that internally assessed [within schools] work is solely that of the candidate concerned. This is a threat to the fairness of GCSE.

Dr Boston is there highlighting exactly the same issues that I am highlighting in relation to the South Australian Certificate of Education. The only difference is that the percentage of coursework in our assessment is much higher than the percentage of coursework in the subjects that Dr Boston is talking about, yet he still sees the problems being significant in the United Kingdom. Dr Boston's report went on and stated:

There were 3,500 cases of alleged malpractice investigated by awarding bodies in 2004—that is just one year—but not all of the malpractice involved coursework...The most common malpractice offences in relation to coursework are: collusion, plagiarism and over-coaching by teachers.

This is the official report of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which looks at the equivalent of our SSABSA board in England, Ireland and Wales.

Dr Boston's group has recommended that, in some cases, coursework—in essence, school assessment coursework—be removed completely from certain subjects. That is, that there be no coursework at all. As I said, we are moving to a situation where, at the very least, we are looking at the total assessment of subjects being 70 per cent. Dr Boston, having looked at the problems in the UK is saying, 'Hey, in some subjects we will remove coursework completely because of the problems of cheating through plagiarism, collusion, over coaching by teachers and assistance by parents.' In other cases it is recommended that the percentage (that is, in the UK) be significantly reduced; that is, the percentage of coursework be significantly reduced.

In other cases, he says that there will be what he calls controlled assessments. That is, rather than a student being able to take a particular essay home and have their parents or relatives (or someone else) assist in the writing, or whatever it is, a student will have to do the work in a controlled environment like the school and under supervision. They might be given the task and have to go away to do the work on it, but in terms of the writing of the essay, they would have to come into a controlled environment at school and be seen to have written the essay themselves, not have the essay written by their parents, a mate, or an older brother or sister.

The student will then have to undertake that particular work within the controlled assessment environment of the school because of the concern that parents and others are actually writing it. Various reports that have come out on these changes, as I said, make it quite clear that the authority is moving to control very tightly and to try to reduce the extent of cheating within their equivalent certificates in the United Kingdom. As I said, they are doing that by reducing the extent of work that can be done at home and outside controlled environments by increasing the percentage of exams and increasing the percentage of assessments which, in essence, are externally assessed.

When we look at the United Kingdom experience, at the moment they are identifying the problem of subjects where the coursework—that is, the non-examination component—is as low as 20 or 30 per cent. The problem that he is talking about is in relation to subjects where coursework is 20 to 30 per cent and public exams are 70 to 80 per cent. We are now moving to a situation where we will have coursework of 70 per cent. He thinks they have a significant problem with cheating when it is 20 to 30 per cent of course work, and he says that it is a threat to the fairness of the certificate in the United Kingdom.

Late last year, during the debate on SSABSA, I asked a series of questions of the government and the minister. I will not repeat them all here, but I believe some of them to be important—and the minister did not provide responses or answers. I asked the government, for example, whether SSABSA was now looking at purchasing and using the sort of anti-cheating, anti-plagiarism software which universities are using and to which Dr Boston is referring. I asked the minister to indicate how many examples of alleged cheating or malpractice have been made to SSABSA in the past few years, and what action has been taken by SSABSA in relation to those issues. I also made a relatively simple request; that is, an assessment breakdown of the current year 12 subjects, namely, which components of public exams are within the subject assessment outline at present.

There were a number of other areas, but they were the three key areas, and the government for its own reasons chose not to provide responses or answers to those questions. I am now forced into a situation of having to pursue some of them through freedom of information. The dilemma is that the Senior Secondary Assessment Board, either in significant part or completely, is beyond the purview of freedom of information legislation. Therefore, the capacity to get some of this information, if it is not provided by the government, is significantly restricted and inhibited.

In my view, the Future SACE is heading in completely the wrong direction. It will only lead to much more widespread cheating and rorting than already exists. It is already significant within the SACE at present. It is time that someone was prepared to look at what is happening in other parts of the world, in particular in the United Kingdom. Dr Ken Boston knows the Australian and South Australian system. We should listen to some of the lessons they have learnt in the United Kingdom and realise that we are signing a recipe for educational disaster, if we are not prepared to look seriously at the decisions that this government is implementing through the Future SACE; and, sadly, we will not see the end result until 10 years down the track.

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER: I thank the Hons Mr Wade and Mr Lucas for their contributions on this motion. As a result of the Hon. Mr Lucas mentioning the Hon. Mr Wade's dissenting report, it is important to note that the dissenting report was not so much a dissenting report. The Hon. Mr Wade went to some lengths to note that he supported the majority report but, rather, had an additional recommendation which was not supported by the majority of members and which he wanted to append to the report. It is perhaps a minor detail but, nevertheless, important.

Having had the benefit of hearing the evidence presented to the committee, I must say that I do not share the pessimism expressed by the Hon. Mr Lucas for the future of the education system in this state. Based on the evidence before the committee, I think I can say that that pessimism is not supported by the education sectors—the state sector, the Catholic and Independent schools sector or the tertiary sector. I commend the motion to the council.

Motion carried.

PARLIAMENTARY BUSINESS
MEMBERS
GET INVOLVED
ABOUT PARLIAMENT
VISIT
LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL
HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY
CONTACT