Schools site

[Rainbow Moonlight]

Site wasn't as bad as i expected but very open to misunderstanding. From personal experience I would say the social disadvantage ranking system doesn't match reality but then again my experience is outdated and things may have changed. I think it may be able to be reformulated to be a better indicator _ i am unsure why aboriginality is one fo the factors involved int he social disadvantage ranking. Things like household incomes and numbers of centrelink recipients and proportion of non-english speakers and ratio of broken families and crime rates in collection districts might be relevant factors.

I think many people will not even look into what the SIM and ALL categories mean or click the links in the left hand column or realise what they are about. I also think teher can be varied explanations of natplan results that are better (for instance) in yr 9 than yr 7- one woudl be that the school teaches well and improve student's abilites ove rtime, btu they ar enot the same students so come form a different pool than the two year later or earlier pool.

I haven't finished examining the site yet- interestign to see a fundung per capita figure and if ti makes any difference to shown results.

One other aspect that it is clear doesn't show up on the site is the instanc eof bullying in the school- I noticed one private school in Canberra that had above average results in general but which accordign to general knowledge has enormous problems with bullying. So I hope the site doesn't give people the wrong impression based on misinterpretation, inaccurate social disadvantage information, or lack of imformation.

I wa spelased to see that theer was a social disadvantage included as well.

Soemthign else that woudl be very good is median class size, smalles t clas ssize and largest class size for each school, as class size has been linked with results in many studies.

[Jovial Monk3]

The private school near me was better but only by a few points than similar and all schools. No wonder with all the coaching they do! i expect there will be a bit of a drift back to public schools.

papers also dramatised one or two people selecting a suburb to move into based on the better school serving the suburb--that has always been the case, maybe now that will be a bit strengthened.

[boxy]

The problem with giving stats on bullying, or other subjective criteria, is that they are hard to quantify reliably. Schools would probably show up as having high bullying rates simply because they had a high rate of bullying being reported, which is a sign that they are, at least, attempting to deal with the problem. Schools that "sweep it under the carpet" would be wrongly identified as having little to no bullying.

[Ethnic]

The website has had a mixed reaction at our school. The principal is looking at ways that we can teach and what extra services we can put in place to boost our profile. It's sound pretty good and I will back her 100%. I'm devising different assessments that would more interactive which doesn't compromise on quality content. Of course, the biggest issue at our school is the lack of desire for learning from the students themselves. For too many kids, school is just for social chatter and nothing else. A cultural change needs to happen before our results can improve. Doesn't mean I won't stop trying.