They don’t take all comers.

They don’t tell us about student wellbeing and happiness, about achievement in areas beyond the classroom, and crucially, about whether a school actually helped a young person improve. All Rights Reserved. All rights reserved. The King’s community is extremely proud of the achievements of our young men, across a wide range of courses including: ALL ROUNDERS (Scoring 90 marks or above in 10 or more units in the HSC). They get to choose. But several years ago, Dib told me about the effect on his students of seeing a Naplan league table.

Congratulations to the Class of 2018 who have achieved outstanding results. Demographic data available on the MySchool website shows the schools in this year’s top five in NSW had no enrolments across the entire school from the lowest socio-educational quartile of the population (the official measure of advantage devised by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which takes into account parents’ occupation and levels of education). NSW schools are ranked according to their ‘success rate’ which is the ratio of Band 6 (or E4) to student entries. The minimum entry test score to get into the school in the first place is usually higher than for any other selective school. Some of Sydneys most expensive private schools have flunked out in the Higher School Certificate rankings this year, while newer migrant-dominated schools in the west are big improvers. The concern is that some parents, who tend to come from more advantaged backgrounds, respond to school rankings by shopping around for a higher ranking school – often a private or a selective one – abandoning their local comprehensive. “James Ruse isn’t the ‘best’ school – it’s a school that takes all the ‘best’ students,” is how Adrian Piccoli, the former NSW education minister, Nationals MP, and now the director of UNSW’s Gonski Institute for Education, puts it to me. Collaboratively our young men and teaching staff have worked with focus and diligence to achieve remarkable results with the highlights below: The mark of a Kingsman is a young man who has applied himself to all the academic and co-curricular opportunities available at King’s, enabling him to graduate ready to contribute broadly to society and make a difference. The following courses produced their highest number of Band 6 results on record: Ancient History, English Advanced, Chinese Continuers, Chinese Literature and German (equal highest). And I was formerly a newspaper education editor who wrote about league tables and witnessed the voracious interest from readers.

Results lower than a band six – or 90 – don’t count.

Languages Department has achieved State Rankings for each of the last three consecutive years. After Jihad Dib became principal of Punchbowl Boys High in Sydney’s south-west, he was widely celebrated for helping to transform a once-notoriously unruly public school into a source of pride for students and the local community.

Copyright 2019 - All Rights Reserved. Below are the 2017 high school rankings across NSW based on HSC results. He believes looking for effectiveness, not outcomes, is more useful way of thinking about good schools. “The problem is what it’s increasingly doing is concentrating high SES [socio-economic] kids in these schools – the concentration of advantage in some schools is growing and that also means the concentration of disadvantage in other schools is growing,” Piccoli said.

Essentially, what they show you is the rate at which a group of students, on average, reached a particular benchmark. As the only ACT school still in the NSW system, this year Canberra Grammar dropped again in HSC rankings. Consistently, in NSW, these rankings are topped by the most competitive public selective schools, as well as some of the most expensive private schools (which are of course, selective in their own way – charging $30,000 a year is a pretty selective barrier to entry). “‘You told us we were a good school, and this is saying we’re one of the worst schools’,” Dib recalled. 87-129 Pennant Hills Road, North Parramatta, NSW 2151, Australia • Josephine Tovey is associate news editor at Guardian Australia, Available for everyone, funded by readers. Shellharbour Anglican College was one … “I said all that’s important is the effort you make.”. But the focus on rankings, and the emphasis on education as a competitive exercise between schools, contradicts more important messages about striving for excellence – wherever a student might start from – and the broader role of education in becoming a healthy, well-rounded person.