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

UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion Webinar

The Future of Education – Towards 2027

ATAR: Scaled For Injustice? Or Just Irrelevance?

 

 

Friday, 4 September 2020 at 12 noon

 

 

 

About This Document

 

This document contains a draft transcript only.

 

This draft transcript has been taken directly from the text of live captioning provided by The Captioning Studio and, as such, it may contain errors.

 

The transcript may also contain ‘inaudibles’ if there were occasions when audio quality was compromised during the event.

 

The Captioning Studio accepts no liability for any event or action resulting from this draft transcript.

 

 

 

 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Hello, everyone who is joining us.  We're just waiting for the participants to come into the room, so to speak, the virtual room.  We're currently at 130, so I'll wait for about another minute and then we'll start the proceedings.  Thanks for joining us today.

 

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 Professor Andrew Parfitt, who will welcome you to the webinar.  Then we'll proceed with housekeeping and scene setting for the day.

 

PROF. ANDREW PARFITT:  Thanks, Verity.  Welcome to everybody on this sort of 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 has provided me with a really nice set of notes which quite rightly celebrate the work of the Centre and some of the programs there and able to call out the great work that's been done particularly around increasing participation among low SES students in particular, but I'm going to follow a well standard tradition here, a well‑established tradition here, of going off script briefly, partly in response to what I think is an engagingly provocative title, partly I think 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 anybody we admit to a course at university will be able to complete their academic studies with the appropriate support and resources that we make available.

 

If we look back over the past decade of extraordinary growth in participation in universities, we can see that that has 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.  Unfortunately the ATAR ‑ fortunately or unfortunately, the ATAR has got a bad wrap.  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 places for people at university.  If the demand‑driven system was dead then, the Bill 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 many years ago, and I still remember this whenever specific allocation to courses, there is now a resource allocation per student.

 

So I 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 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 ‑ to the 101st, 102nd and 103rd student who didn't get in?  How do we balance academic requirements, opportunity, all the things 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 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.

 

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.

 

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

 

PROF. ANDREW PARFITT:  No problem.  I'll read the report afterwards.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  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 has opened with that idea also of the sort of restricted funding envelope that we now currently have and needing that in mind as well as our conversation procedures. 

 

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'll 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 up‑vote 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 up‑vote 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 will 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 unrest.

 

Even before the pandemic, Australia had nearly 12% of its young people aged 15 to 19 not engaged in employment or education and around 1 in 5 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 immeasurable 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 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'll now say it ‑ now does have a pathway to UTS for 300 students at our low SES partnership schools in south‑Western Sydney where we don't use ATAR at all, in fact they don't even have to be on 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 which map against the national curriculum.  Widening participation programs often work with students already achieving high grades, focussing 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 to find those students who aren't already on a pathway to university, who aren't going to make the ATAR cutoff and who 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, then 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 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 poll check from our attendees here.  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.

 

The results should be displayed in a couple of seconds.  We're waiting with baited breath. 

 

And here are the results.  There you go.  That's interesting, isn't it?  So no‑one believes ‑ 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 ‑ needs to be updated and adapted, it should be changed dramatically, and slight victory there for it needs to go completely and be replaced.  So there you go.  That's actually good, isn't it?  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 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.

 

PROF. 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 I know 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 sit 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 I've got ‑ and we emphasise 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 ‑ of course 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, 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 gain 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 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.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  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 to ‑ I've already seen 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 ‑ my notes have now gone because the screen changed ‑ 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?

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes, we can.

 

VIV WHITE:  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 interested. 

 

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 they don't do the curriculum, what about the math, et cetera, but we actually knew that if people just generally, not just young people, but if people actually could pursue their passion and interest, their chances of actually improving their learning were much higher.

 

So that's the design, the young people start in a school in year 9, they travel through with one of those through the whole four years until year 12, pursue their passions and interests three days in the classroom and two days in the community, and listening to Peter's passion about careers, we actually have built that whole work experience learning in the community design every week of the year for four years starting at age 14.  Our young people are out and about learning in the community and that work actually counts for their portfolio work that they build over those four years.  Each term they do a learning plan, each term they do an exhibition with their families, with their mentors who they work with in the community and their class group.  That accumulates evidence of their learning against a set of six learning goals, which I'll share with you in a moment, and those learning goals are assessed against a set of standards that count both inside and outside the school.

 

So as we progressed in our innovation ‑ we're like an innovative group ‑ always with our hands over our eyes saying, "Is this going to work, is this working?", we came across the issue of the ATAR, the HSC, and it came about with three children in Newcastle who said, "We've just done this most magnificent two years of pursuing our interests, deep learning, highly academic vigorous work, now you're going to make us sit the ATAR?"  We thought we can't really, it doesn't actually fit our learning model.  So we started to think well, we've changed the pedagogy, we've changed the curriculum, the way we approach curriculum, and we thought well, we have to change the way we do our assessment.

 

So the first three kids got into university in Newcastle University with the support of the vice‑chancellor using portfolio of their work.  One was physiotherapy, one was biomed and one was law, the three children from Gateshead in a very impoverished community in Newcastle, and we used the Australian core skills framework to map their learning back to a standards framework because the vice‑chancellors were saying to us, and now there's 16 vice‑chancellors we work with with universities, we're pretty tired of really low level alternative pathways, a very competent principal can sign off with a principal recommendation, a more wealthy kid can buy their way in through a year 13 strategy, but so few of those alternatives were actually rigorous and standards based.

 

So for the first four years we used a graduate portfolio with the children's work internal mapped against those national standards and each of the kids going to university had to do a senior thesis project which is that second level of year university quality, so it's gold‑standard work.  And by the end of those four years we'd had about 30 kids, 40 kids going to the various universities all over Australia and doing all sorts of different degrees, including medicine and international studies and you name it, education, physiotherapy, psychology, journalism.  And we found we were frightened by the success at one level, we thought well, we can't scale this ‑ the question of scale always comes ‑ Big Picture is a niche initiative, how can you possibly scale this graduation portfolio?

 

So I was casually introduced to Professor Sandra Milligan from the Assessment Research Centre at Melbourne Uni and she said, "I'm so fascinated by your work, I want to help."  So what we've done ‑ to get to what we're doing, to use your word there, Peter, we've got a new Big Picture Learner Profile and that Big Picture Learner Profile is  significantly rigorous and standards based and we're at the stage now where we're building a trust piece, if you like, that this will be a new credential for new forms of learning in Australia.

 

So what does it look like?  We're issuing the first learner profile mapped against our suite of credentials and they will be assessed at the end of this year and 25 more kids will be going into university with this first iteration of the profile.  That's sort of the front piece.  I've sent a link.  It's going to be on the website so you can just download it and have a look at it. 

 

But effectively we've designed six new credentials.  I'll give you a chance to have a quick read while I have a drink of water.  You'll see that every single kid, all the way through to year 12, will be doing maths, quantitative reasoning, will be doing empirical work.  So there's no bailing from any of the core ‑ what we call the core disciplines.  They are the matrixes we've used.  They're warranted by Melbourne University as a legitimate standardised framework to use with confidence. 

 

That's what the whole profile looks like and, as Peter was saying, we have fantastic video ‑ the kids actually do a video presentation of who they are and how they are as a learner.  They often do ATAR subjects, but not the ATAR as a piece, and this is warranted, as I say, for those of you interested in the stats side of things.  That slide talks a bit about that.  And finally I want to say thank you and happy to take questions later on.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Thanks, Viv, that's wonderful.  So as you can see, Big Picture is working on a learner profile of the type that Peter and his panel have recommended and one of the recommendations ‑ we can talk about this later on, but one of the recommendations of Peter's panel is okay, if we're going to introduce a system of learner profiles across the country, how do we actually standardise that.  So this is part of the reason why we wanted Viv to come along.

 

Interestingly, as part of our alternate entry pathway at UTS, we're also creating a learner profile, but that's the point, we don't want just a whole lot of different learner profiles, so how can we start those conversations?

 

The next person we'll get to present is Mehrdad Baghai.  Now, Mehrdad is here today because he is co‑founder and CEO of High Resolves, which is a not‑for‑profit social venture in citizenship education.  It's engaged over 400,000 young people across the world and he also is engaged as an industry professor here at UTS.  He also has an extensive incredibly impressive CV in business and tech and commercialisation and I could read it out forever, but trust me, he's very well established.  But we're mostly here to talk about High Resolves.  I particularly wanted to talk to Mehrdad because part of the recommendations in Peter's report is around citizenship, the skills you actually need to be an active citizen, and this speaks directly to the work of High Resolve.  Welcome, Mehrdad.

 

MEHRDAD BAGHAI:  Verity, thank you so much, it's lovely to be here, and thank you to everyone else for being with us and the panel members.  I think Peter raised this point about active citizenship and that is what we do at High Resolves, try to create programs for young people to learn skills, like the ones he mentioned, collaboration, advocacy, independent thinking, being able to drive collective action, and these skills are seen as 21st century skills, but it's interesting what a pandemic does to get the world to recognise that actually these skills give national advantage to countries that have them.

 

If you think about what it means in terms of citizenry, that's able to think not just about their own personal liberty but to put it in the context of what that liberty means for society as a whole and when is it appropriate to wear a mask, for example, if science dictates that is helpful.  That is a citizenship skill.  So do we have students and adults who are capable of doing the kind of reasoning it takes to do the balance between self and collective interest and strike the right balance there. 

 

So we help principals and schools put together programs in citizenship education for high schools.  We have a lot of our own curriculum, but also draw on curriculum from about 30 other providers across the world.  In Australia we've worked with 500 schools, also up in New Orleans, Toronto, Latin America, Brazil, getting going in Mexico and a couple of other countries, India, Armenia, getting going in France, Israel, a number of other countries.  So it's a global program.  And in addition to the geographic growth, we've been spending a lot of our time building platforms which we think will be important for the transformation of the education sector, particularly as it relates to this space. 

 

So we have a platform called Composer, which is designed for schools to be able to integrate curriculum from about 30 different providers, including some of the absolute top ones from the US, and be able to mix and match them like Lego almost to put programs together.  For example, if we want to work on racism in grade 8, how do we put a program together that according to learning science will have some impact there?

 

We have another platform videos for change where young people make 60‑second videos on social themes they care about.  We can put that platform into schools, schools can have their own film festivals.  We use the voice of youth to trigger conversations about civic society, about social issues.

 

We have a partnership with Open Learning which allows us to do remote delivery.  So we've been providing digital platforms to a lot of schools in Australia as well as other parts of the world so we can do remote delivery during Covid.  One of the things that's been interesting to me is as we measure the impact from these remote courses, of course many remote delivery courses have been wanting, but we've been getting even higher net promoter scores on digital delivery than we did originally.  And it was something we wouldn't be able to fathom six months ago.

 

So there is a lot of experience that we've gained in terms of using these platforms.  We just received some funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to build an adult education platform on racism and that is proceeding, our first course goes to pilot next week.

 

So I think what's been interesting for us is, as we have geographically expanded the reach of these programs, but also with these programs, we come to the table for this discussion with a clear bias.  We believe in a broader definition of achievement and we're concerned about equity and fairness issues in terms of how that's measured.  So for us it's not about whether or not we should go broader and be more fair or which measures, for us it's of course we have to have both.  We have to have a broader definition of what's getting measured and it has to be fair.  The interesting question is how do you do it?

 

So maybe I could just share a few observations about the system and then some parts of the answer as far as we're concerned.  So first of all, Daniel Allan said one of the most important things to measure is participatory readiness and as a question, does ATAR measure participatory readiness?  Well, does a university transcript measure participatory readiness for work?  I think it's a common problem that most education systems have which is that the way they measure success is actually disconnected from the way the real world after education measures success or measures preparedness.  So we start with that break as a starting point, is that there's a disconnect between the world of education and what follows and whether that's high school or university.

 

The second thing is do you measure the student or measure the trainer and the teacher?  Of course, anything measuring is measuring both, so the ATAR has a scaling factor to try to address that, but of course it's as important to measure the teacher or to measure the educational systems.  We know if you go to Osterman's work that creating a sense of belonging enhances the ability to learn and enhances performance.  So do we grade the schools on whether or not they've been able to create a sense of belonging?  Do we judge that?

 

So one of the things that we've noticed is when it comes to things like this, people measure whatever is easier to measure because there is this known in business everyone says unless you measure it's not going to get done, so let's measure something and when it comes time to measuring, measure whatever is easier to measure. 

 

You go to political theory, Joseph Nye talked about soft power.  No‑one says soft power is hard to measure, so let's measure the number of armaments in countries and that's good enough.  No, you try to measure cultural power because you know that from a politic point of view it's an important way of projecting influence and so on.

 

So as we come to this field of education, for us it's not just pragmatics about what's easier to measure and let's create a learner profile type of thing that is pragmatic and it measures things.  So all our attempts have to balance that need for pragmatism with some views as to what really needs to be measured and this is where the challenge is and Verity, I think you talked about it, Viv and Peter did as well, the assessment landscape for soft skills is unbelievably fragmented.  There are thousands of frameworks out there on how to measure these things, okay?  So given that, you cannot be an advocate for a single framework without connecting yourself to the ecosystem and trying to move towards something that will become the standard.  If everyone wants everything to be a standard, it's very difficult for a standard to emerge, right?

 

These are observations about the system.  I'll make one more, which is that the solution some have come up with is to say you know what, we'll list people's accomplishments, the passport will have a transcript of activities, and micro credentials, by the way, are increasingly in danger of just becoming a list of things people have done, not competencies they have learned.  It doesn't tell you how good you are at collaboration.  It tells you that you completed a string of activities on something.

 

So I think these make this a very tricky issue.  So what is the answer?  I don't know what the answer is, but I think there are three factors that are certainly part of the solution.  Number one, you have to move to a world of what we call embedded micro assessments.  What do I mean by that?  This whole fault line between assessment and curriculum, between lesson and test needs to be blown apart.  It's a false dichotomy.  Any lesson going on is presenting countless opportunities for data to be captured.  It's just that we don't do it. 

 

It's interesting to watch that in the rest of the world if you think about the internet of things, censors are put on everything, from roads to buildings to farms.  So essentially if we were able to keep track of data as it's generated by students, then we would have no shortage of data on which to make pronouncements.  For example, in some of our simulations when students are playing diplomats and negotiating climate change agreements, they make so many decisions in two and a half hours.  If we wanted to collect all that, we would have a massive ream of data to judge everything from their ability to do strategy to tell stories, to be able to interact with each other, to be independent thinkers.  It's just that we don't measure that stuff and we don't collect it, right?  So without that deep data store, it's actually difficult to come up with the right measurements.  So we will measure the easiest things.  So one of the first things is bringing IOT to education by actually starting to measure all those micro interactions that take place, that give us data on what students are actually doing and eliminating this dichotomy between lesson and test.

 

The second one we've talked about is the idea it has to have an ecosystem correct live approach, so this cannot be institutionally owned.  By definition, any framework that an individual institution puts forward and says, whether that's UTS or someone else, it is going to be flawed because it is not in the public's ability to use it.  So if you look at, for example, what's worked in the field of finance, financial reporting works because people agree to a standard like XPRL or something like that or the way financial statements are presented in GAAP.  In a similar way we need a basic standard agreed to so we don't get 1,000 flowers bloom and learn to zero in and create a system that will be more workable.

 

So in this case the experiments that have gone on in the last 5 years are incredibly helpful because we've learned a lot.  So Viv's or other frameworks will tell us a lot about what the standard needs to look like, but we do need to move to a standard.

 

The third thing, it may sound at odds, is that the standard is not a framework and this work has to be framework agnostic.  As Peter was saying, you take something like independent thinking.  What does independent thinking mean to me versus Verity?  We come to it and maybe my school has three values and one of them is independence.  So the thing is when we try to measure independent thinking, it is made up of a bunch of subcontracts.  I might choose six of the same subcontracts as Verity, but a couple of different ones.  There's going to have to be the idea that there's standardisation in the way we collect and report data, but some flexibility, as Peter was saying, to adapt what is being measured to the needs of the community and the culture of the community that is measuring that.

 

So with this in mind, I think a bit of a road map on how we go about this and I think that it's important for Australia not to be an island on this.  As important it is for us from a Covid point of view to put up the fortress and protect ourselves, that isn't the case in education.  There is a lot of work going on globally on this.  There's US philanthropic funding.  We've had a lot of success getting US philanthropic funding.  It's almost impossible for us to get funding from the Australian foundations in education.  I don't understand it, but that's the case. 

 

So in the meantime, the US philanthropic organisations are funding the work we're talking about, proofs of concept in Kansas City and other places, and our hope is we move from the design of alternative competing frameworks to more thinking about the mechanics of data collection, allowing people to sort of gradually move towards a common universal standard for this sort of thing to work.  Let me stop there, Verity.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Thanks, Mehrdad, that is great.  Peter Shergold does point out exactly that that's what they want to create.  One of the recommendations that comes out of the report, it says firstly we need to establish a common language to describe these general capabilities, and then we need to develop standards to evidence these capabilities, right?  But I loved what you had to say that that's a complex problem that we're now going to have to face and bring all the different things together.

 

Now, last but not least Sally, I'm going to hand over to you, and then there's some brilliant questions on the Q&A.  So I think we'll probably go straight to the audience Q&As after Sally because I want to give people a chance to have their say. 

 

Professor Sally Kift is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Law and elected President of the Australian Learning & Teaching Fellows.  She used to be Deputy Vice‑Chancellor (Academic) at James Cook University as well as Professor of law at QUT.  She was awarded an Australian Award for University Teaching Career Achievement and was a member of the Australian Qualifications Framework Review Panel that reported to the government in 2019.  Sally.

 

PROF. SALLY KIFT:  So thank you very much for that, Verity.  I'm just sharing my screen.  Now I hope that that's happened.  I don't think it did.  I apologise.  Let's try again.  Share screen.  Yes, please, Fiona, if you wouldn't mind.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  It's not a proper webinar without some ‑‑

 

PROF. SALLY KIFT:  Here we go, that might have happened.  Thank you very much for all that.  So I'm taking a slightly different stance.  I'm when we get them to university, how will we support this diversity of entrance and preparedness and participatory readiness, as Mehrdad identified it as.  One of the things to be thinking about in this in terms of a connected lifelong education ecosystem I think is quite useful.

 

I just wanted to start by using other people's data.  This was on Tuesday night of this week, the ABC 7.30 Report looked at the big uptake in applications for university, whether we have any capacity to actually take these applications.  That's another matter entirely, but I think what you're seeing here, for those who aren't immersed in higher education, is a widening participation environment in which the diversity of entering cohort and the massified sector have become a reality for us all which is something that we've had to grapple with for some considerable period of time.  So it's no longer appropriate for us to assume that just because they come, they will be retained and successful whatever their particular conceptualisation of success might be.  So we need to work hard with our students of course while they're in higher education, but we also need to work in the lifelong learning ecosystem context with also industry and business and professions to include them in what this will look like for a future world.

 

So it's a rickety old bridge, certainly not the Sydney Harbour Bridge, for those transitioning from school to university and, sadly, my experience as a 16‑year‑old first in family low socioeconomic status student at university, I fell through those gaps a number of times.

 

When we look at what actually causes students to leave or depart early from university, what they think about in that regard, it's a mixture of dispositional, situational and institutional factors.  When you look at the top five reasons ‑ and they can nominate a number of reasons, so these percents don't actually necessarily add up ‑ you'll see they've been fairly standard at least for the last two years. 

 

So this is our national student experience survey data, the most recent data released in March of this year.  Health or stress has been consistently the highest reason for considering departure at 45% in 2018 and 46% in 2019, but you see other situational and dispositional matters there, and when we think about the financial difficulties and then the experience of being first in family at university, then there's this great complexity in their lived experience of university that comes very much to the fore.

 

And having read that excellent work about experience first in family students, these are the words that leapt out at me.  There are a large number of students who come to university of course and are not terrified, apprehensive, stressed, nervous or shocked at what occurs, but this is also at least a transitory experience, if not the complete experience for a large number of students.

 

So what I'm going to talk about ‑ I'm sorry, this is my lawyer background coming out, so I like words, it's not my natural resting disposition to be doing pictures.  So I'm sorry, you'll have to live with my words because this is actually really important.  It's what universities do and there is significant and robust evidence that says that it's what universities do that has a greater predictive validity for retention and success than what individual students' backgrounds or characteristics might have the impact on.  This is transformational work from a university perspective.  It's whole‑of‑university intentionality about not leaving student success to chance.  It's helping students manage their very complex and multiple transitions, and by that I mean they're making transitions not only to independent learning and independent living quite frequently, but also academically, socially, administratively, environmentally and including now, as we've just experienced, the digital experience interface, we can really make no assumptions about their entering preparedness.  We need to be very clear about being consistent in our expectations and understand and acknowledge and respect that the individual transitions are experienced quite uniquely.  And universities need to be ready for the students they receive rather than students being expected to be university‑ready students. 

 

So we need to acknowledge and mediate that diversity which means we've got to turn our whole big culture and structure ship around.  We've got to have relationship‑rich experiences.  I've heard someone say with a relentless sense of welcome so that there's a sense of, as Mehrdad already has identified, academic and social belonging which impacts on their ability to engage, and engage is a holy grail for us, we talk about it endlessly, but engagement again is very complex.  It's engagement with learning, with peers, with teachers, with the discipline, with their industry and future professions, engagement for first in family students with the families and communities, as we've just discussed, engaging students as active citizens and our more recent forays in Australia where we've been following what's been happening for many years in the UK in particular engaging with students as partners.  And then we need to ensure that we wrap around the support and services that students need so students aren't dependent on having to seek out assistance for themselves, that we make all of that mediation quite easy for them.  And something again that's becoming increasingly evident and exacerbated in the context of the pandemic, a whole of institution because all of this needs to be quite intentional and coordinated and comprehensive and focused ‑ a whole of institution approach to mental health and wellbeing with an ethic of care.

 

So you'd be surprised to hear me say those who know me that what really works in this context then is inclusive ‑ next slide, please ‑ first‑year curriculum because that's the thing that's inescapable and it's equitably inescapable.  It's where we have all students whatever their diversity.  Please excuse me for talking about curriculum in an environment like this, but for universities it has to be an intentional inclusive, well‑designed curriculum that unpacks all those hidden rules of success, that's all of those adjectives, the major one I suspect is achievable, that triages proactive intervention so that students ‑ because we know this, it's not we don't know the experience as it will unfold for them, so we proactively push to them just in time just for me communications and support, we explicitly scaffold the development of enabling skills and literacies, we move on and attend to early assessment and formative feedback so they get a sense of how they're going, and develop critical assessment and feedback literacies because learning, teaching assessment at the higher education level is different ‑ it's not necessarily better, but it's different.  So we need to assist students to make that sort of transition.

 

And also that we provide equitable access to employability development opportunities, by which I mean assisting students around career development learning and the development of 21st century skills, as we've just been discussing, builds ‑ it's a curriculum that builds self‑efficacy and competency and assists with that mental health to be compared with curriculum that does damage to our students' mental health.  Thank you, Fiona.

 

No, go back, that was the funny bit, the only funny bit of the whole presentation.  First year shouldn't be an episode of Survivor.  Reflecting on that, it also probably shouldn't be an episode of Bachelor with drama and constant weeping.

 

So what I'm particularly interested here in trying to think through post ATAR is the foundation of a lifelong learning ecosystem and I think we've reached the situation now where we must be committed to universal tertiary education for all, so trying to think how our students will transition to post‑secondary qualification, and I've gone to enormous lengths here to put TAFE and higher education on a level playing field with equality of status.  We would like to think it might be possible to blend vocational education and higher education qualifications, but that might be a world apart.  Even better still, there be a seamless interaction between the knowledge, skills and attributes that students develop at school and how they might all be done. 

 

But then we need to think once they've had that first step of universal tertiary access, tertiary access, this lifelong learning up and reskilling we know is so critical in industry 4.0 terms, how that constant interaction around on‑the‑job training, experience from learning integrated work, what they do there and how we might recognise that experience in terms of recognition of prior learning, the various free online DIY upskilling, short course credentials, micro credentials, continuing professional development, how they all interact. 

 

We need to do that with ‑ there's another build here, please ‑ build with good career advising, which a number of panellists have already mentioned, with this lifelong learning record, which I'm quite happy to give way to a lifelong learning profile or whatever, but there's some way of capturing all this.  And as a recent report released just yesterday has said again and as regards our higher education experience, there is observably variable practice across the sector with regards to credit recognition, so we really need to work on that.

 

I was going to finish with a quick look at the AQF Review.  It was in response to Viv's excellent interwoven pieces of twine.  This is how we conceptualised in the Australian Qualifications Framework Review the interaction between knowledge, skills and general capabilities over the course of a modern contemporary qualification design trying to take account for particular industries, for particular qualification types and levels that interaction.  And thank you, Verity, I'll leave it there.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Thank you, Sally.  I apologise to panellists, every single presentation has a deep richness to it that we really could be here all day.  I know we're keeping things moving.  That was great, looking at that lifelong learning continuum you're talking about and how that also directly speaks into this recommendation of education passport that you take with you all the way from the beginning and throughout your life.

 

Now, I'm not going to ask my own questions, though I have plenty, I'll throw to the ones already coming up from the floor.  We have 15 minutes to do this, so we'll try to be succinct.  The highest rating question is Chris Preslin's question around "a lot of people comment about the reliability of the ATAR as a predictor of university success, but I was wondering if there's any actual research that indicates its level of success." 

 

I'll quickly answer that and open it up to panellists, but the answer is yes and what the research shows us is that it is true to say that a high ATAR does predict a high level of university success.  If you get a 97% ATAR, in all likelihood you'll do well at university.  What is interesting is that low ATARs don't predict failure.  So you may get under 70 or particularly actually once they're under 70, really don't predict how you go at university.  So it doesn't really give us the full rich information that we would like it to give us in terms of predicting success.

 

The other thing interesting about the ATAR which everybody knows too is the close correlation between socioeconomic status.  You can almost predict ATAR based on the socioeconomic status and educational background of the students.  So there is still that very firm link.  Does any of the other panellists want to comment on the ATAR in terms of predictability of success?  Viv?

 

VIV WHITE:  Very interested in that whole question and they've done a big study about that.  Whilst we recognise kids are leached out on their way to ATAR by social class, so there are fewer children attempting at that level, once they actually survive the system and get to do an ATAR, the poorest children do better than the rich, which is really interesting.  There's fewer and fewer of them of course, but Rufus's little quote was they've survived one system, they're going to survive the next.  So they've built all these skills of university skill level to do very well compared to their more affluent peers.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Very interesting.

 

VIV WHITE:  I had no idea that that was the case.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  Well, the data we have at UTS that shows our low SES entrants too, once here they all do as well. 

 

Alison Green ‑ now, I thought this was a good question as well because it goes to Peter Shergold's point about actually equalising the pathways, making it so that university is not seen as the gold standard and VET is second cousin, and Peter has recommended we actually look to equalising that.  I think that is going to be very difficult and Alison writes, "Our experience of schools in low SES areas students are channelled into vocational pathways not academic pathways.  Academic pathways are actively discouraged.  How do we counter this?"  Peter, do you want to comment on that?

 

PROF. PETER SHERGOLD:  Yes.  Look, I think it's a really good point.  A lot of my time at Western Sydney University has been supporting the Fast Forward program, working with I think 85 schools out in Western Sydney now, encouraging them to go to university.  So obviously my aim is not to discourage people.  What I want is people to make their choices about their interests, their inclinations, their passions. 

 

But I think it goes to something that's even more profound because at the expense of being even more radical, I think the problem is that we've created a quite unreal demarcation for students and a quite unnecessary one.  Increasingly I think we need to go back to imagining a tertiary sector, a tertiary education, not just that you have your sector universities and we know many students do higher education and move to vocational education and vice versa, but actually where we integrate theoretical and practical knowledge in the tertiary sector.  The good thing is young people are actually voting with their feet.  They are moving between these and doing work‑integrated experience and doing micro credentialing.

 

We've got to stop saying that this is a choice you've got to make now.  One of the things that most horrifies me in the pressure that young people face in this year of Covid‑19 is the number who still think, "My God, this is the most important decision in my life, if I bugger up year 12".  We have to say, "No, actually, that's not true."  There are innumerable pathways now and that's what we should be producing people for.  We should be telling young people, "If you want to go to university, absolutely.  If you want to go and do vocational, absolutely.  If you think you're probably going to do both of those." 

 

So what I want I suppose ‑ really it goes back to a career education, where people can start to talk about their interests by industry and they can see laid out before them the whole range of different skills and trades and professions and realise that they've got the choice to mix and match that up.

 

At the moment I think we are moving towards a tertiary sector, but when we talk to kids in years 8, 9, 10, we are talking to them as if they've got to make this choice between higher and vocational education.  That is I think extraordinarily damaging.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Does anyone want to add some more comments on that?

 

PROF. SALLY KIFT:  A quick comment from me, Verity.  It goes to a piece Peter and others spoke about.  We need to get career advising right across the lifespan and it starts obviously in secondary school.  If we could get that right with a constant iterative aspect of it, then I think we'd be far better placed.

 

PROF. PETER SHERGOLD:  Can I just say, if we believe in lifelong learning and we all talk about it, we've got to say hand in hand with that goes lifelong career advice and guidance.  It's a big step forward.  We've got to take it.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Now, the next two most popular questions are closely related, so I'll combine them.  It's really about making sure that, as Sally said, the hidden rules of success are transparent, that the problem is how do you make sure that these learning profiles don't become just as imbued with the same class and cultural biases as an ATAR is and how do you move away from the idea of just universities determining their own localised admission systems which has been shown across the research, particularly in the US as outlined by Emile, to work against the interests of less represented student cohorts.  Does anyone want to have a go at that?

 

PROF. SALLY KIFT:  The first thing I might say, which is not directly responsive, your Honour ‑ sorry, my legal background ‑ one of the issues around the alternate pathways is they're very difficult to navigate.  So it becomes hidden ‑ layers of hiddenness, how do you access this and how is it made clear when we're thinking about the students that don't get access to good career advising and even those in schools where you'd expect they might get good career advising they won't regardless ‑ the more we layer this and make it alternative we run the fear of running the whole system down.  So that was just a quick comment.

 

And university has a lot of work to do about that.  The Higher Education Standards Panel Peter chaired until recently, in their fantastic report on retention and success and attrition, recommended ‑ and I'd love to see our institutions doing this ‑ we speak with every student that comes in and sort of says, "That's your starting point what you applied and got your offer for, now may we give you careers advice and think about your real interests and aptitudes and what might set you up best."

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Viv?

 

VIV WHITE:  I think the thing that I was really surprised about when we started Big Picture was the notion of what we call learning through internship or learning by leaving school to learn while you're 14 and pursuing your passions.  Over the last nine years we've noticed a change in the students' interests.  So part of the problem is we've got the lovely young man we hope to get into UTS David Fan from Liverpool Boys High.  David Fox, his mentor, came to the school and said, "Anyone want to do work experience in welding?"  All the hands came down.  He came back a year ago, "Anyone interested in augmented reality?"  All hands went up.  Nobody at that school understood, nor did I, what is augmented reality. 

 

So understanding the richness and diversity of what the new world of workers like is beyond I think ‑ sorry, a bit radical, beyond the traditional setting of schooling to know about it.  One careers adviser, thousands of kids know all those industries.  We thought no, get rid of that altogether and the kids pursue their interests and they find out about the industries.  They go to shadow days, they go to informational interviews.  They change mentorships according to their interests, discover.  Other relationships outside the school building because they've got two days a week to do it and they learn about new forms of industry and kids move from marine biology to, oh God knows, hospitality to augmented reality over a period of three weeks sometimes.

 

So I don't know, we've got to really think new forms of careers advice, new forms of relationship with people outside of the school building because it's such a closed system.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  So bearing in mind we've got only 4 minutes left, I'll toss something now to Mehrdad because we are talking about the complexity of capturing all of this in a way that does have transparency and explainability so that it doesn't just become another opaque system and how do we actually do that. 

 

I want to look at the comment Jane Hunter made while Mehrdad was speaking:  "Education is a human business just more and more data is not the answer.  The impost on schools, principals and teachers is huge, context is everything in schools."  Mehrdad, what do you have to say about that?

 

MEHRDAD BAGHAI:  I think it's a great point Jane makes and I agree with her.  I think that what was interesting is when we were first doing this work, our initial reaction was to create another NAPLAN, another test that would measure these soft skills, and we had focus groups of principals and educators and I couldn't get a single educator who thought this was a good idea.  So everyone agrees with Jane.  So what actually had to be baked into the design work is to make that a constraint, which is anything you do here has to not just be no extra impost on teachers, it has to actually take away impost.  It has to be happening in the background automatically as much as possible so you're not adding any work to schools and teachers.  She's absolutely right.  The interesting thing is that technology lets us do that.  As long as we've got the right architecture, you can collect it.

 

Now, this ties to your second point, which is that often times when we have data and you see an answer on a multiple choice test, even though the SAT, for example, was originally designed to take away bias, it's clear that cultural context makes a difference.  So if you're not capturing the why, why is a student saying a certain thing, you're unable to judge whether or not the right moral reasoning is there, you know?  Maybe they're using a different ethical literacy style, maybe their lived experience is different.  So you need to understand more about the context than that.

 

The nice thing about technology and some of the work Simon, who's in the group, is doing is being able to sort of scan massive amounts of text and words and be able to intuit the underlying thinking processes that are going on.  I think that's going to be a key to this and I think ‑ so Jane is right, Simon is right, it is going to take a while to get there, but I think that's the path that makes the most sense.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  All right.  One minute to go.  Is there anything that any of our panellists have burning that they want to say before we close this really excellent session?  Well, that's wonderful.  Peter, did you turn your mic on?

 

PROF. PETER SHERGOLD:  Thank you for the opportunity.  I've really enjoyed it and I've really enjoyed the questions.  So thank you very much.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  I just want to thank all of you.  That was great, so I hope our audience has enjoyed it.  I think they have.  There's been really great engagement happening in the Q&A.  These webinars are recorded, so we will be putting the link up on our website and we'll share it on social media and you can share it around your groups. 

 

As I said, this is just the first of a series that we're doing around the future of education.  The next is actually going to be about the role of universities more broadly in engaging social change and in the context of a sector that has been really rapidly disrupted and we're also going to do one later in October around student mental health and how to actually start tackling that, something I think all of us at the coalface are seeing coming up more and more.

 

Thank you again for everyone attending.  A big, big thank you to our panellists today and hopefully see you at our next venture.  Thank you.

 

(End of webinar)