Parents are being short-changed by school reports which lack the “colour and movement” of previous generations, the head of the biggest network of Catholic schools in the state has declared while unveiling plans to overhaul and broaden how students are assessed.
Sydney Catholic Schools, which operates 147 primary and secondary schools across NSW, will measure student ability in domains such as creativity, discernment, resilience, “practical wisdom” and problem-solving skills.
Executive director Danielle Cronin said the framework would also examine how progress was reported to parents.
“I’ve seen very few excellent school reports to parents over the last 20 years – very few,” Cronin said.
“I’d say we have short-changed parents for years around how we communicate their own child’s development and achievement. In an increasingly litigious, combative environment between home and school, teachers naturally become more circumspect so they don’t find themselves in a contested environment.”
Under Australian law, schools must issue school reports twice a year, give students a mark ranging from A to E and be written in language readily understandable to a person responsible for a student at the school.
Cronin said the review of the assessment framework would question the twice-a-year report, or if something “very different” could be developed that would paint a more holistic and balanced picture of student achievement for parents. “But also [provide] information for parents that actually helps them understand their child and what they can do to assist,” Cronin said.
The framework will be developed with researchers at Boston College in Massachusetts as part of an eight-year strategic plan.
Cronin said key achievement markers such as NAPLAN and the HSC remained important, but said the new framework would seek to reset the focus of school to other areas of achievement.
“I think there’s probably been a hyperfixation on NAPLAN at the expense of other things,” she said.
“In some respects, that is driven by government, it’s driven by system authorities, it’s driven by parents who put this emphasis on NAPLAN as the proxy for academic excellence.
“We’ve got to try and calibrate and refocus and get clarity around how these things operate together to achieve the outcomes that we want, and not have to choose between NAPLAN and something else.”
Yvette Farhart, whose twin sons Lachlan and Henry started at All Hallows Catholic Primary School in Five Dock last week, welcomed the move to broaden the school’s focus.
“There’s so many other career pathways that aren’t necessarily being taught so much at school,” she said.
Parent Leah Cracknell said, in her experience, school reports had been explicit about what her year 2 daughter had to work on. “They’ve given real-life examples of how she’s going well in one area but how she can improve in another,” she said.
She looked beyond marks when looking at reports and looked at effort, respect in the classroom, the ability to work with others and being kind. “For me, those skills are just as important as the maths or English result,” she said.
University of Sydney Professor of educational measurement Jim Tognolini said resilience or compassion might seem like abstract concepts, but they could be assessed and measured.
“If something exists, it exists in an amount, and it can be measured and there are processes we can apply, to build measurement rubrics, to enable students and parents to monitor students’ growth in skills that are highly valued,” he said.
He noted that literacy and numeracy were important, but said the competitive nature of NAPLAN had changed the focus on schools.
“Schools are spending all this time to succeed on the test, which is narrowing the curriculum, and it was never how it was intended,” he said.
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