I am personally aware of a parent who has had 3 children taught by the same teacher. Each child has been given the same assignments and the same homework.

The teacher has not changed anything from one year to the next, and if a student was not doing well, "so what".

League tables may help to change that.

Schools and universities purchase almost nothing from Australian companies, and give the public very little information.

There is almost no connection left between the Australian education system and the rest of Australia.

Either the schools start and provide some decent information to the Australian public, or they cease to refer to themselves as being Australian.

The sloppiest thinking of all is to think of students in collectives such as schools. According to this view, it is the poor governmental bureaucracy that is 'disadvantaged'; the students compelled to attend it are merely its chattels or assets on the basis of which it receives funding.

The purpose of education is to fulfil the potential of the individual student. Anyone who thinks this is best acheived through a gigantic government department, in league with a left-wing union, based on compulsory contributions, compulsory attendance, compulsory curriculum and compulsory accreditation, is dreaming. It is in fact a paradise for vested interests, such as the comfortable socialist academic author, who has not the slightest direct interest in a successful outcome for a given student. And fighting to keep it that way!

The only real failure of the league tables is that after being published for years and pointedly identifying the poor performing schools, the state department of education and teachers union have chosen to do nothing constructive.

What they are trying to do is shoot the messenger, and hush it up.

I thought we were living in a democracy?

League tables are a failure because they make a complex problem unrealistically simplistic. The underlying assumption is that schools are the critical difference between a successful education and a poor one. I have taught in a large number of schools and have learnt from that experience that schools play only a small part in a student's success. Factors such as whether or not parents can afford private tutoring, the education of the parents, the amount of reading the students has been exposed to before starting school, the amount of books in the house, parents income, nutrition....the list is almost infinite.
The only real value of league tables lies in guiding policy makers in their allocation of scarce resources - yet they are rarely used for this one purpose.

Thanks for that Baygon, some real truth in your important point. "Whether the parents can afford private tutoring", is the real fact.

I thought that's was what we paid teachers for.

Now get out the violin, & play the one about large classes. Before you do, remember some of us went to school with classes of well over 40, & often 50 kids. Strange isn't it that we were getting over 90% in external exams, in senior physics, & maths, in such classes, with out coaching.

This was before the syllabus was dummed down to be more girl friendly. Are you telling me that the current crop of teachers are less competent than those of yore? Well well, we now agree on something.

So what will fix the problem? How about league tables, not only on schools, but on teachers too.

Remember the old inspectors, who used to rate teachers for the promotion list? Inspectors rating them for the incompetent list would help, heaps right now. The bottom 5% to be dismissed, or would this be against their human rights?

Our schools have become a haven for the lazy & incompetent, protected by the union, & trendy "education" systems & waffle. Our kids deserve much better, & league is a part of fixing the mess.

Did I hear the union saying teachers are worth more money? HA.

To Baygon. I agree with all those extra success factors on your list and I would add one more significant feature, which can even override negative home influences - the quality of an individual teacher or, on a wider scale a particular subject faculty in a high school. I am sure in your experience you would have encountered those teachers who consistently get results well above the school average and whose classes students manoeuvre to get into, but when there individual successes are aggregated into an overall school result this data is lost. I also came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald last week (19 Aug)where in a list of 12 priorities, happiness and safety of students was at the top, followed by a school being clear and consistent about its objectives, while the influence of student results came tenth.