NAPLAN should be scrapped, independent schools more tightly regulated and classes that include students with special needs should be reduced in size, a review commissioned by the WA teachers’ union has found.
The review, chaired by former premier Carmen Lawrence, aimed to assess the state of public education in WA following major changes over the past 10 years.
Dr Lawrence said teachers were being asked to do more with less.
“There’s been a sort of cumulative impact of policy changes … that often haven’t been supported,” Dr Lawrence said.
“The professional education is not there, the local support is not there.”
She said the result was staff getting “churned through the system” and a lack of equality in access to quality education in the state.
The panel’s report found the independent public school model was not improving student outcomes and had amplified growing inequality in the WA education system.
It also raised concerns that while the independent school system empowered schools to choose who they hired, it had led to difficulties in staffing regional and remote schools and produced inequality in terms of which schools could secure senior, experienced teachers.
The report recommended a thorough review and annual audit of independent schools’ spending over concerns they were not currently accountable.
The panel also found the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) — introduced in 2008 — had not resulted in any “sustained improvements” in educational outcomes or reducing inequality.
“The benefits for teachers from NAPLAN have not materialised and many have experienced increased workload and a loss of professional standing as a result,” the report said.
“Individual national testing has narrowed the curriculum for children while teachers spend more classroom time ‘teaching to the test’.'”
The panel recommended scrapping NAPLAN in favour of the internationally recognised Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), testing less frequently and not publicly identifying schools in the results.
It also noted feedback from teachers who said funding needed to be significantly increased for children with developmental, behavioural or mental health issues in the mainstream system, to support smaller class sizes.
“What we’ve found is that there’s a concentration of disadvantage in some schools and the resources are just not available, financial as well, the distribution of funds are not commensurate to the problems teachers face,” Dr Lawrence said.
The panel recommended the WA government develop and fund a dedicated cross-portfolio service to support these students, along with guidelines for making decisions on their “optimum” placement.
It also found teachers were not being provided adequate resources to develop and implement “meaningful, individually tailored plans for students with special educations and behavioural needs”.
The switch of year 7’s to high school had resulted in increased costs, staff dislocation and additional workloads, but the benefits had not been established.
It broadly called for a reduction in class sizes, saying they were higher in WA than in other states and asked for teachers to have to do less administrative paperwork.
It also recommended employing experienced teachers to run small-group tutoring for disadvantaged students.
The needs of Indigenous students were also not being met, “despite a myriad of often expensive programs (that are) frequently introduced without rigorous evaluation or consultation”.
ATAR completion rates in Western Australia were significantly lower than the national average and are declining.
(ABC)
