My School still misses the mark
The soon to be relaunched My School website is already under the pump for producing a bizarre skewing of school rankings.
Critics say the new version does not take into account the incomes of parents, rich or poor, which has led to ridiculous groupings of supposedly similar schools.
Many private schools are concerned that Commonwealth school funding, which is under review, could be linked to the rankings, at their financial cost.
My School is based on the Index of Community Socio-Advantage (ICSEA) rankings, which links “statistically similar schools” across Australia through using such factors as the social and economic background of students, remoteness and the proportion of Indigenous students.
The latest complaints have arisen from schools which have been given access to the data before it goes public. The My School website allows parents to compare results in national literacy and numeracy tests.
Under the new version, parents in the top income-earning occupations are not taken into account, prompting allegations that the site will produce grossly unfair results.
Critics said schools with high numbers of wealthy parents would appear less advantaged, and schools with high numbers of unemployed parents would seem better off, which could impact on their funding.
According to The Age this week, The Hamilton and Alexandra College in western Victoria is ranked as more advantaged than elite schools including Geelong Grammar and Haileybury College, though its fees are half those of Geelong Grammar.
The Hamilton and Alexandra principal Bruce Simons said his school’s ranking was ”grossly unfair”, particularly given 35 per cent of his students came from agricultural families, many of whom were doing it tough.
“The school’s ranking, in my view, is clearly and profoundly flawed,” Mr Simons said.
“Any similar funding model which ranks us alongside much higher-resourced schools would result in a serious threat to the school’s existence.”
The widespread concerns about the credibility of My School is damaging for the federal government and Schools Minister Peter Garrett, who late last year was forced to delay the launch of the revamped website after conceding the financial data for some private schools contained serious errors.
The Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority decided last year to use parental occupation and education – rather than students’ postcodes – to calculate advantage on the revamped website.
However, the new method does not take into account the number of parents in the top-income bracket of senior management and qualified professionals. It also excludes those on the bottom of the pay scale, such as labourers, machine operators, hospitality staff or the unemployed.
Instead, it focuses on the middle occupations. If a school has a high number of parents who are “associate professionals” – farmers, people in the arts, sports and media – it gets a higher ranking, while many blue-collar tradespeople means a lower ranking.
The existing My School was lambasted after its launch last year for improbable groupings of some of Adelaide’s elite colleges with average government schools.
St Peters College and Westbourne Park Primary School are lumped together, as are Loreto College and Geranium Primary; and Marymount College and Blyth Primary.
Another notorious oddity was the case of Sacred Heart College’s two middle-school campuses, at Mitchell Park for boys and Marymount for girls at Hove.
Though the student profile at both schools is likely to be exactly the same – many of the students are boy-girl siblings – they did not appear as “statistically similar schools”. Moreover, they do not share other SA schools within their own groupings.
Sacred Heart’s list included Athelstone and Nailsworth primary schools, Immanuel and Star of the Sea; while Marymount’s had the primary schools at Blyth, Brighton, Gilles Street and Stradbroke, and Mary Mackillop College, Kensington.
Des Ryan | InDaily