The main flexibility of the SACE is the completion data…

The Flexibilities of the SACE Part 4

Mainstream schooling in the senior years in South Australia gains it shape and its structures from the organisation of the South Australian Certificate of Education.  Students are granted the SACE on completion of a pattern of learning over three years.   Most students accumulate their SACE points through involvement in a range of discreet subjects, delivered by expert teachers within a timetable.  The individual teacher is responsible for a part of the student’s learning program.  The school is responsible for ensuring that those parts enable the students to meet the SACE.  Individual choice is catered for by choice between subjects and some choice over content and form within the subject.

Teachers retain significant amount of freedom to negotiate content and form to meet the learning needs of their cohort of students within the subject framework.  Teachers develop learning and assessment plans for their subject and able to further modify and amend the LAP to accommodate differentiation.  Students have some ability to negotiate their own content and form with research projects or investigations within individual SACE subjects and in 2 of the compulsory subject exploring identity and futures (EIF) and activating identity and futures (AIF) The evolution of these two subjects from Personal Learning Plan where students plan their way through SACE to meet career and life goals and The Research project where students negotiate form and content of significant project at Stage 2 comes from the curriculum tradition of enabling significant negotiation to ensure that the SACE is “within the reach of all.”

The individual curriculum pattern of subjects that a school offer is a school decision. The amount of negotiation within subjects is negotiated between teachers, students the school which leads to the high completion rates reported by both schools and the system. These high rates of completion don’t bear up under scrutiny. The major flexibility in the SACE is the completion data that allows the real rate of SACE and the inequities of completion to remain opaque

100%

Schools across South Australia, even in the most disadvantaged areas, will proudly declare in their newsletters, their annual reports and even on illuminated signboards, that their school has 100% SACE completion. The 100% is calculated, not from the number of year 8 students who enrolled in school with the idea of completing year 12, or even the completion rate of the 9 out 10 students in year 10 who are beginning their SACE journey, but includes only those students who have lasted in their SACE journey and who in the last part of that year had the “potential to complete SACE” because they were enrolled in the right number of subjects and had satisfactorily completed their compulsories. Students who left school after commencing their SACE studies, or students who did not fit the correct enrolment pattern were not part of the data set that allowed schools to declare that they had achieve 100% SACE completion. These are the official figures based on SACE Board calculations given to the schools.

The National Report on Schools data base has, since the introduction of the “new qualification” reported that South Australia has the highest completion rate in the nation, with the 2022(last available figures at time of writing), year 12 Certification rate of 88.8%. The caveat is that in South Australia since the introduction of the “new qualification” Data included students at SA contact schools completing the SACE requirements and students receiving a Record of Achievement for completion of at least one full year (20 credit) Stage 2 SACE subject.

This matters because despite the “Flexibilities of the SACE” and the current SACE continuing to recognise the centrality of schools in negotiating SACE to meet the needs of diverse cohorts of student’s achievement in the SACE we do not have transparency. The closest we have come to transparency is through the DfE which has, since 2019 published a report tracking individual student enrolment is public education from year 8 to SACE completion. Looking at this data, over the last 5 years we can see clearly that SACE completion is strongly correlated with SES and location. If we take year 12 completion as the percentage of students who enrolled in year 8 who 5 years later achieved the SACE, then the accepted figure across all sectors is a figure of around 74%. For Education Department Schools who cater for most disadvantaged students the figure is at best 54%. For those young people who begin year 12 completion is 70% - some 3,000 students begin year 12 and don’t achieve their SACE. In the year 22/23 South Australia lost 7,424 students from the end of year 11 to the completion of their year 12 studies. We don’t know what this looks like for 2024 because the DfE has not made these statistics available on the website where they have previously been published.

Not having access to timely information hides the issue of the inequality of both retention and achievement in the senior years. Despite attempts to put the blame on schools by measuring their “success” rates of completion. This is a failure at a policy level. Curriculum in senior school in South Australia is governed by the SACE this in turn constructs and shapes the day-to-day practices of school.