School league tables are not straightforward

Second, the information is not a reliable guide. Many students in private schools get personal tuition, so is their result a reflection of the school or of the fact that the parents were able to afford extra help?

The reality is that we are in an age of mass education. Pareto’s maxim hold’s true for schools as for everything else. In any school in the country the 80:20 rule will apply. If you pay a small fortune for private education then that offers you no guarantee that your child will have good teachers. I have seen outstanding and poor teachers in both the private and public sector.

So why carry out standardised testing? Why develop profiles of school performance? Because they are essential for making sound policy decisions. In the 80s the Federal Minister Susan Ryan made generous funding available for Priority Education Programs. The PEP program identified the following as areas of disadvantage: gender, aboriginality, ethnicity, disability, geographic isolation and poverty. When faced with that task it was realised that we really had no way of knowing which schools really needed additional resources and which didn’t. Standardised tests and consequent league tables are a useful tool for allocating resources - to want to use them for anything else means to use them for something for which they were not designed.

Think back on your own education. If you enjoyed a normal education then you would struggle to come up with more than a handful of teachers who inspired you - the majority have faded into obscurity. If you want your child to be successful then take the journey with your child, work with the teachers and the school and in the vast majority of cases everyone will be better off for the experience.