The pendulum swings back. Twenty years ago the ACT education system began an experiment to separate Year 11 and 12 from high schools to create separate colleges. They worked on the presumption that the students would be young adults, and indeed some not so young adults, rather than children. The colleges would provide an atmosphere somewhere between school and university with greater emphasis on individual responsibility and freedom to be educated, rather than coercion.
In tandem with greater student freedom and responsibility came greater freedom and responsibility for the colleges in developing courses, in setting the standards to be used in presenting results in the Year 12 certificate and in setting the patterns of the teaching year.
The system had success on several fronts. It greatest success was that the ACT has by far the highest retention rate for Year 11 and 12 in the country, but that might be as much due to the general higher education and economic status of parents the ACT inculcating a view among children that education is something of great value. Its other success was to permit mature-age students and those who had dropped out for a couple of years after Year 10 to return to the final two years of secondary schooling in an environment not possible under the old high-schools system.
Its third success was to provide a great range of subjects with various colleges specialising or getting a reputation for being good in an area so that students can gravitate to the colleges which are good at the things they want to do, subject, of course, to the constraint of distance between home and college.
The system had weaknesses, too. Principally, there has been a fair degree of employer confusion and scepticism, though that has waned over the years as employers have become more familiar with the system and, indeed, people educated under the system become employers themselves. Nonetheless, the saving grace of the system for employers remains the Tertiary Entrance Rank where one percentile number ranks students out of 100 … precisely the sort of single measure that modern education sought to avoid.
Another weakness, according to some employers, has been the absence of an objective externally set and mark exam, as in other states and territories, that can inspire confidence in the outcome of the assessment process and provide the basis for comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each college, something dear to the heart of parents, but of much less concern to teachers who dislike such comparisons. However, other employers want students who have aptitudes that are not necessarily measured by exams. Indeed, the hand writing of answers to exam questions in three or so hours while cut off from the rest of the world and its information sources might seem a bizarre way of testing aptitude for work in a computer driven world with the keyboard and mouse and access to mountains of information on the Internet, CD-ROM and other databases.
The other weakness is that the colleges have perhaps become too independent with different term lengths and different methods of course scoring.
Now the colleges have agreed they need greater consistency. The head of the Department of Education and Training, Fran Hinton, says she will have in place by 1998 a system where all colleges will have the same course-scoring, semester structure and standards based assessments. The move will be applauded by parents and employers and has a great deal of merit, provided colleges do not lose the ability to attract out-of-area students through pursuing excellence and choice in some areas. The emphasis must be on what is best for the education and employability of students and to build community confidence in the system and not uniformity for its own sake.