Recording: ATAR: Scaled for injustice? Or just irrelevance?

Descriptive transcript

All right, we'll kick this off now. Thank you very much for joining us today at the first of a series, in fact—the UTS Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion will be hosting a number of sessions around the future of education as we move towards 2027, but also in the sense of a post-pandemic response.

Before we begin, I'd like to, of course, acknowledge that wherever we are in Australia, we are on the traditional lands of First Nations peoples. I want to acknowledge the Gadigal land of the Eora Nation, which is the ancestral lands that our city campus stands on at UTS, but I also want to acknowledge the traditional owners of all of the land that all of our participants are meeting on today, pay respects to Elders past, present and future, and acknowledge the Australian Indigenous people as the traditional owners of knowledge for our country.

So my name is Verity Firth. I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice here at UTS, and I also head up our Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion. Before we begin, I'd like to introduce the Provost of UTS, Professor Andrew Parfitt, who's going to formally welcome you all to this webinar, and then we'll proceed with a little housekeeping and scene-setting for the day. Andrew.

Thanks, Verity, and welcome to everybody on this slightly rainy day at UTS, at least. Let me also begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we're gathered. We celebrate and recognise their knowledge, their culture, their contribution to our communities, and pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging.

Verity's provided me with a really nice set of notes, which quite rightly celebrate the work of the Centre and some of the programmes that are there, and I would call out the great work that's being done, particularly around increasing participation among low-SES students in particular.

But I'm going to follow a well-established tradition here of going off script briefly, partly in response to what I think is an engagingly provocative title, partly because I'd like to set a scene from the perspective of a university leader that has the responsibility of admitting students to university.

I think it's fair to say that the obligation we have to admit students to a university is not whether they've achieved a particular ATAR or anything else. It's our academic judgment of the likelihood that anybody that we admit to a course at the university will be able to complete their academic studies with the appropriate support and the resources that we make available.

And if we look back over the past decade of extraordinary growth in participation in universities, we can see that that's had enormous benefits to our community, and we have diversified quite significantly the way in which we make selections for study at university.

I think in 2018, it was noted that over previous years, only a quarter of applicants to university were admitted on the basis of an ATAR alone. And unfortunately, the ATAR has got a bad rap. It's either used as a moniker of prestige for a course, as some sort of numerical summary of academic achievement, in some cases for schools as a badge of honour that people have got to a particular academic level.

But coming back to my point is that traditionally, universities have essentially been making admissions to students who are fully funded by the government to study. And we've been able to provide the resources to ensure that success. That changed when Senator Birmingham pulled the brake lever on the demand-driven system and essentially capped the number of places people could go to university.

So if the demand-driven system was dead then, the bill that's now before the Senate Inquiry basically buries it by actually putting a limit on the funding that will be provided to universities. And therefore, although not specifically as it was in years, many years ago, and I still remember this when it was specific allocation to courses, there is now a resource allocation per student.

So turn again to the ATAR and what we're trying to achieve here. Because if we were trying to find diverse methods historically to see whether students achieved a threshold of achievement which would enable us to have reasonable confidence they can succeed at university, the challenge now is to apply the same sort of considerations around equity and opportunity and merit to a limited number of places for a large number of applicants.

So in selecting students for a particular course where we might have 100 places, what do we say? This is the question I think we have to ask when we're looking at the question around ATAR, which is essentially a rank. What do we say to the 101st, the 102nd and the 103rd student who didn't get in? How do we balance academic requirements, opportunity, all of the things that we want to see around diversity in particular disciplines and professions with admission to university?

And it's a different problem I think to the one that we had some years ago where we used all sorts of different measures to be able to track the success of people from diverse pathways into university. So my challenge to you today in the conversation is to have a look at what I think is the future problem, not necessarily just the problem of the past about diversifying the number of ways one gets to university. How do we still continue to provide equitable opportunities for access to university in a different world going forward?

So I hope you have a really fun discussion. It's not going to be an easy time to ensure that we do adhere to all of the principles that we want to around access, inclusion, opportunity. But let's start the conversation and I hope you have a great webinar today.

Thanks, Andrew. That's wonderfully provocative, so thank you.

No problem. I'm sorry to leave you now. So I'll read the report afterwards.

Yes, yes. Well, we're recording. So we'll send you the recording. See you.

So before we begin—that's actually interesting and I'm glad that Andrew's opened with that idea also of the sort of restricted funding envelope that we now currently have and needing to keep that in mind as well as our conversation proceeds. But anyway, let's get to it.

A little housekeeping before we get started. This event is live captioned. So to view the captions, you need to click on the link that's in the chat. You can find it at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel. The captions will open in a separate window. So please avail yourself of the captions if you need them.

If you have any questions at all during today's event, there will be an opportunity to ask some of our panellists and we will do that through the Q&A box. So again, the Q&A box is at the bottom of your screen. You can type in your question and you can also upvote other people's questions. So I will then mediate. I will be choosing the questions that are the most relevant to the topic, but I'll also be looking a bit at what are the most popular questions as well. So if you want to upvote questions, please do so.

It's an online event. So like all online events, things may go wrong. If they do, please bear with us. We will work to resolve them quickly.

And as I alluded to at the beginning, this event is the first in a series of webinars that our centre is hosting on the future of education towards 2027. In this series, we'll be considering what universities can do to make access to education equitable in the near future, which of course is weighed down by financial unease, changing social conditions and a variety of unrests.

Even before the pandemic, Australia had nearly 12% of its young people, aged 15 to 19, not engaged in employment or education, and around one in five students not finishing school.

What we all know, or at least I think most people who've signed in to do this webinar know, is that education opens up opportunities. We say this so much that it sounds cliched, but it is actually true. We know that the impact education has on people's lives is measurable, and that impact extends to the lives of their families, their communities, and to the children that they may have in the future. But the opportunities to take up post-school education are still unequally spread, and as Andrew alluded to, in times of tightening resources, that can become even more unequal if we're not really proactive about it.

Students from underrepresented and low socioeconomic backgrounds face complex challenges and barriers arising from their socioeconomic status, their social circumstances, and their geographical location, rather than any intrinsic capability. Young people are losing out. Universities are losing out because we don't get to see them. And, of course, industry are losing out because they're not tapping into the whole talent pool that is available.

And yet we all still work with or work around, as it may be, a system where university access is primarily, although as Andrew pointed out, this is changing, but primarily determined by a ranking that, for many, many of us believe does actually replicate social inequality.

As a public purpose institution, UTS places social justice at the heart of our university's priorities and our purpose. We firmly believe that universities exist for public good. And that means that we must do all we can to bring about change for a more equal, socially just, and sustainable society.

So at the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion, we have been exploring different ways to open up access to university to underrepresented groups of students. And, in fact, UTS—this was in Andrew's notes, but I will now say it—UTS now does have a pathway to UTS for 300 students at our low SES partnership schools in southwestern Sydney, where we don't use the ATAR at all.

In fact, they don't even have to be on an ATAR pathway. But they do participate in a process of workshops and learning, where we assess their general capabilities—a lot of what we're going to be hearing about today—where we seek to provide a broader learner profile of these students and enable them to come to university without an ATAR. This takes a holistic approach to assessing learner capabilities of students, measuring them against UTS 21st century skills and attributes and general capabilities that we map against the national curriculum.

Widening participation programs often work with students who are already achieving high grades, focusing on raising aspirations, providing academic support to satisfy existing educational frameworks or increasing awareness. What we're endeavouring to do through the U@Uni Academy program is actually to go and find those students who aren't already on a pathway to university, who aren't going to make the ATAR cut off and will not be admitted. And we find them and we embrace them and say, we recognise your talent, your potential, and we want to help you succeed through non-traditional measurement criteria related to commitment, mindset and passion and 21st century skills and capabilities.

UTS is the only—this is the boasty bit, sorry, and now we'll move on to the broader discussion—but we're the only Australian university providing a fused widening participation and outreach program that has both alternate entry and enabling entry programs all wrapped into one, comprehensively tracked, non-traditionally assessed and future focused for students from a low SES background. It is important to have programs like this so that we can tangibly see the outcomes that different approaches can deliver. So part of what we're going to be now doing is tracking these students as they enter our university to be able to monitor their progress and success, to build a body of evidence that supports scaling up this model.

By expanding equity measures, offering direct access and moving away from old models that simply focus on building up aspiration without addressing structural disadvantage, we can leave behind rigid, outdated policies that perpetuate educational inequity.

So I am very excited now to open this future of education series with a discussion with some fantastic and clever people who are unafraid to question the status quo and look at various alternatives. And I will introduce them in a minute, but first we'd like to get a pulse check from our attendees here today.

A poll is about to appear on your screen in a moment and we're asking you to indicate your stance on the ATAR as it currently is. So please take a moment to vote now.

And here are the results. There you go. Well, that's interesting, isn't it? So no one believes in the total—well, 3% of people think it doesn't need to change at all, but the rest are evenly distributed. A third, a third, a third. Okay, but it needs to be updated and adapted. It should be changed dramatically. And a slight victory there, slight victory there for it needs to go completely and be replaced. So there you go. That's actually good, isn't it? So we've got a group of people in the room with varying opinions and we can now engage and discuss and have a good event.

So the first speaker today is our keynote speaker. This is Professor Peter Shergold. And he is, of course—he probably doesn't need to be introduced to this audience, but I will anyway. He's the Chancellor of Western Sydney University. He chairs the New South Wales Education Standards Authority and has recently headed a panel which presented a report to the COAG Education Council. If you haven't read it already, we're going to put up a link in the chat. It's really worth a read. It's entitled Looking to the Future and it calls for a bold reform of senior secondary education. So I'm now going to hand over to you, Peter, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

[Professor Peter Shergold:] Well, thank you, Verity. Thank you so much for the opportunity to participate in this first of an important series of webinars organised by UTS and incorporating such a distinguished panel. I really appreciate it and most of all, I have to say, I am delighted that so many of you are interested enough to Zoom in this lunchtime. I think partly because of COVID-19 that we can use this sense of crisis to drive bold educational reform and to drive it relatively quickly. We can, if you will, seize the moment.

Now, before the pandemic became obvious late last year and the beginning of this year, I chaired a distinguished panel to prepare a report, as you've heard, for the COAG Education Council, a report on how to improve senior secondary pathways, and it was delivered in June. Wonderfully, the report, as you've heard, has been released for public commentary and discussion even before it's formally considered by the Education Council later this month and, as you've heard, it is I'd have to say pretty predictably called Looking to the Future. Less predictably if you look at it, you'll find that that quote comes from a leading American educationalist writing in the early 1940s.

Now, it's already clear I think, and I'm crossing my fingers as I speak to you, that there is significant interest both in South Australia and here in New South Wales in many of the 20 recommendations that that report put forward and of course it's important not just for public schools, but for Catholic schools and independent schools who will need to consider the arguments.

I have to say that in some ways the report is deeply conservative. What do I mean by that? Well, the panel was left in no doubt that even though—in fact, because—the future of work is being so heavily influenced by cognitive and robotic technology, it is going to transform trades, it's going to transform professions. It will destroy and create skills associated with those occupations and careers.

But that led us to the very strong focus in the report on most of all what we need to do is to ensure that when young people leave school, they have learned how to learn and to keep on learning for the whole of their life and that's central to that capacity—still literacy and numeracy—in other words, reading and writing are more rather than less important in the digital age. It is our view that for any students to leave school without competency in English comprehension or applied mathematics is in effect confining them to a life in the labour market precariat in which permanent full-time employment is unlikely.

We also emphasised, influenced in part by the move to remote learning and working precipitated by the pandemic, that digital literacy, by which I mean the ability to communicate at a distance, the ability to seek credible information online, also needs to be accorded greater status in school education. Otherwise, as we have already witnessed, unfortunately, the digital divide will simply reinforce existing educational disadvantage. So, if you like, we looked back to the future and we looked back to the future too in emphasising the need to provide career guidance and career advice and career development to young people in a systematic and professional manner and to have that career advice integrated into the teaching schedule.

I've got to say my discussions with years 10, 11, 12 students around the country suggested to me very strongly that the quality of career support in our schools is far too dependent on being hero driven. What I mean by that is we've emphasised some wonderful case studies that there are particular schools and there are particular principals, there are particular teachers who are absolutely dedicated to career education, but overall, whilst the quality of pastoral care at schools seems to me to have improved significantly in the last 15 years, that has been accompanied by a commensurate decline in the quality of career preparation. Too often so-called pathway programs that I've looked at are largely superficial, often they're tick a box, and the teachers assigned to the task—often the most junior—are not professionally trained and they are naturally inclined by their own experience to direct students towards university pathways because that's what they know most about. Too rarely were industry experts or employers built into the process of guiding and mentoring young people at school for what is a very uncertain labour market, even more uncertain of course in this Covid and post-Covid world.

But having told you how conservative it is, I have to say that at the heart of the report lies something altogether more forward looking and radical, which is reimagining how we will credential school certificates, how we will judge educational success in a manner that emphasises the attributes that we wish students to identify and to develop and to articulate, to be able to do that not only for economic reasons to improve their employability, and that is important, but also for social reasons, to become active citizens in a civil society, and at the heart of the proposed reform agenda, at the heart of our criticisms of existing senior secondary pathways lies our criticisms of the role of, yes, you know it, ATAR, and the manner in which ATAR in our view is distorting educational experience for students and for their parents and indeed for their teachers.

So I'm in that, or the report is in that third of you who were polled who don't call for the abolition of ATAR. We think it plays a moderately useful role as a ranking tool for universities even though, as we have heard from Andrew, fewer and fewer institutions now use it exclusively in making offers to students.

I've got to say I was surprised a couple of years back when I chaired the Higher Education Standards Panel that less than 40% of students now gain entry to university primarily on the basis of their ATAR score. Even before the Commonwealth stepped in, and I have to say stepped in in part on my advice to improve transparency, some universities—not UTS and not Western Sydney University, but some universities—were really using public declarations of high minimum ATAR scores as a proxy to signal the avowed quality and exclusivity of their educational offerings and it was the most dodgy of numbers that was made public.

I've got to say this as well: when I have talked to parents, particularly parents of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, they often say, "Well, Peter, remember this, that ATAR for us is an objective measure of performance" and what I'm picking up is that many ethnic groups worry that if more subjective measures are used, they will, or their children will, continue to be disadvantaged because of implicit cultural biases or explicit prejudice, and we know there is plenty of evidence that when people apply to education or particularly apply for jobs, a surname makes a difference. For many ethnic families, ATAR is a way of getting around that. It's an objective test.

But I'd have to tell you that in my view, in the panel's view, we don't believe that the manner in which ATAR is presented in many schools and is perceived I think by most young people is adequate. It distorts educational experience in ways that profoundly influence the decision that students make. It's reducing our capacity as a nation to prepare the workforce that we need and the active citizens that we require.

Given that, rough figures, around 40% of young people now undertake higher education and that perhaps two-thirds of school students win their places at university largely on the basis of ATAR, don't you think it's time that we focused rather more attention on the other 75% of secondary students who don't go to university on the basis of ATAR?

So how does ATAR distort? Well, first—and this is extraordinarily bizarre—ATAR scaling can actually deter the pursuit of academic excellence. I heard from many students how they had been persuaded by their teachers to choose subjects and often to avoid advanced levels in order to maximise their chances of achieving a better ATAR score. I mean, this is wacko. And if you don't believe me, have a quick look after this at Dr Google. You'll find there are many sites offering students advice on how to game the ATAR process—a scoring device that persuades students not to seek excellence, not to follow their passions, undermines educational purpose.

The second problem—to the extent that the ATAR score is now widely regarded as a singular measure of school certificate success, it sends out a strong message to students who wish to pursue school-based trade training or vocational education or apprenticeships that they have second-class ambitions. Combined with the poor quality of career education that often exists in high schools, the educational system privileges academic pathways. Instead of putting students at the centre, instead of providing them with an education that can respond to their diverse interests and inclinations and passions, the system implicitly assumes that a student with avowed ability will be directed to university—probably UTS. Rather than being prepared for a tertiary sector in which young people now routinely move between higher education, VET and structured work experience and in which micro credentialing is increasingly important, students at age 15 or age 16 are now often obliged to make a choice, choose, do you want to go to university, and scholastically able students are nearly always advised to do so or not.

This demarcation is just plain wrong. Students in year 10 should not be made to feel that they have to choose between two distinct options that is going to determine their future life. This is somehow 30 years ago. Students today need to understand that all pathways are equally respected and that post school it's easy to move between them. That's not presently the case. Students often have a far narrower range of vocational than academic courses to choose from, resources are limited, and many employers, perhaps falsely, are persuaded that the standard of VET in schools is relatively poor.

Our report recommends that every single student should be given the opportunity to experience workplace learning or attend work skills courses and/or undertake applied subjects such as design or technology. If formal, formal vocational education and training, is offered at school, it should have the explicit endorsement of employers and industry bodies and in many circumstances it can probably be undertaken more effectively at a local TAFE or other recognised training organisations.

I know there are plenty of reasons, but I think it is disgraceful that most young people in New South Wales, for example, that do vocational subjects at school can only have one of them included in their ATAR results and, more importantly, that when they study them, most of them lead to nothing more than a statement of attainment.

There's a third problem with ATAR and perhaps it's the most egregious and that is the dominance of the ATAR is tending to hide the educational purpose of schooling. We want to ensure that our young people go into adulthood not as they so often believe with a good weighted collection of scores based on their knowledge of maths and science and English or history or some other carefully selected combination of subjects, but with the capacity and with the enthusiasm to keep on learning throughout their lives.

Now, I'd have to say we talked about it a bit, but the panel didn't much care whether we articulated this in old languages, general capabilities or new languages, 21st century employability skills. We were convinced that students need to know the attributes that they require for workplace success and community engagement. That includes the capacity to solve complex problems, to work collaboratively, to make ethical decisions, to communicate effectively, to be creative, and so on. Our view is that the precise suite of learnings can be left to each jurisdiction with flexibility being extended to the local or school level to incorporate the particular interests of their own community.

But in our view, it's the progressive development of these skills that we want to see captured and presented in a learning profile. The learning profile—sure, it can incorporate ATAR, it can incorporate individual subject achievements, but it can also do far, far more. We want students and their teachers to fully understand that many of these attributes can be gained studying academic subjects, but also can be acquired in a vocational education class or in debating or in performing in a musical or captaining the netball or the cricket team.

Most radically, we want to help students recognise and develop those capabilities as they work shifts at McDonald's or volunteer for the Red Cross or care for their mum who's got a disability, or interpret for their non-English speaking migrant family, or in remote Australia, undertake the secret Aboriginal business and ceremony associated with becoming an adult. To do so will not only help to right the present imbalance between the status accorded to higher and vocational education, but it will also make the fundamental purpose of school more explicit.

Equally important, it will approach the barriers of student disadvantage quite differently from most access and equity programs. A profile, a learning profile, offers the opportunity to take a strengths-based approach to social deprivation and regional inequity in which the deep learnings—and they are deep learnings—associated with overcoming disadvantage can actually be recognised and recorded and developed. Disadvantage through a learning profile can be a source of advantage.

So in this new world, students through a learning profile will be explicitly focused on the underlying skills that they learn from calculus or the causes of Australian federation or vocationally oriented business schools or the first year of a school-based apprenticeship, and especially if we can introduce a unique student identifier for each and every student, that profile can then become the basis for an educational passport, a digital wallet, that Australians can build on and carry with them as they continue a program of life-time learning. Thanks, Verity.

Thanks, Peter. That is a wonderful introduction to our conversation today and congratulations on a really interesting and stimulating report. So, as I said, people can continue—I've already seen some really good questions coming up in the Q&A, so please keep adding your questions. Whilst you're doing that, I'm going to introduce you all to Viv White.

So Viv White is the co-founder and CEO of Big Picture Education in Australia, a not-for-profit that was established—a not-for-profit that was established, let me just somehow escape. It's funny. It's not letting me escape the full screen. Viv is excellent.

Big Picture—she'll tell you all about it, she is grappling with, or her organisation, a whole lot of issues Peter Shergold raised about how do you actually not only engender a love of learning in students but look at a strength-based approach of actually capturing the way they learn, the love of learning, the general capabilities that they develop through passion projects and so forth. But I will let Viv explain it all to you when she comes back to the chair.

[Viv White:] Can you see me? Can you see the shared screen?

Yes, we can.

Beautiful. We have all systems go. Here we go. Thanks, so much, Peter, for that. I've not really heard you speak with such passion. I've heard you speak, but on this matter I can just see how both intellectually and almost spiritually you have committed to this reform agenda for the nation, and I'm just really proud to be sitting on a panel with you and Verity, who I've known for many years, and to meet Mehrdad and Sally as well is a thrill for me.

I think probably, just by way of introducing myself, I'm often considered a troublemaker and I'm sort of really quite proud of that name, although it did begin when I was very little and it's still with me at the age of 71. But I became very passionate in the early 2000s about watching the results that were appearing for our young people around their completion rates and achievement rates in schools and over all the years of my life on this planet, the data was just getting worse and worse and worse for poor kids, in particular, and Indigenous kids absolutely, and I understood deeply that something needed to give, that it wasn't about the young people, anything inherent, as Peter has said, about the young people's capacity, it was around the way the schools are designed.

Now, we use the word 'new' forms of schooling, which is where I'm beginning the presentation. Just by way of a quick bit of background because not everybody will know about Big Picture, we began, as you can see on that screen, in 2006/2007 and I asked another group of people who I knew well who had been instrumental in programs like the National Schools Network, the disadvantaged schools programs, Whitlam's initiatives, many programs were set up to try to address this increasing inequality in our schools and I decided that something was fundamentally wrong with the hard drive and it wasn't a matter of putting new software on.

So I was privileged to work with the Victorian Government and I looked around the world to see whether any schools that moved beyond what I would call the heroic principle model of school change, where there was a number of proof points where just regular ordinary people like me and maybe you could actually fundamentally rethink the way we do school and I found the Big Picture design in the states and they'd been going since 1996, so I thought I'll bring the ideas back in a brown paper bag because most things American are treated with deep suspicion, particularly now, and I wondered whether this would work.

So the group of people and I got together and we transported the design to Australia to see if it would work here. We had a humble goal of one school by 2009. Here is the design in front of you, you can take a look at that—one school by 2009 and now we have 40 here and 500 worldwide. It begins right at the beginning of a young person's entry into our school by starting a student's personal interests.

Now, we receive still currently, but very early days, a lot of criticism about well, is this something that the kids get to choose and the