Sydney, Australia
The headmaster of one of Australia’s oldest Christian private schools has criticised the admissions system used by universities to accept graduating high school students.
Rev Tim Bowden, head of Sydney’s Trinity Grammar School – which first opened in 1913 and is one of Sydney’s most prestigious private boys’ schools, said the way the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank is used to rank students ahead of entry into university is a “fundamental problem” of the education system.
He said the manner in which ATAR is perceived and promoted, by students, parents and the media, is distorting the educational value of senior secondary schooling and the essential purposes of education. The ATAR – a rank between 0.00 and 99.95 – is used by universities both within Australia and internationally to help them in admissions and in selecting students for their courses.
Tim Bowden, headmaster of Trinity Grammar School. PICTURE: Supplied.
Bowden first alluded to the issue in a weekly column to the Anglican boys’ school community last month as Year 12 students counted down the days until their final exams, which are currently underway.
“There is a vicious cycle at play in which all stakeholders are caught up. Students have learned to believe that the ATAR is the determinant of their future, parents have learned to believe that ATAR results are the measure of school quality, schools have learned to trumpet their ATAR successes, and media reporting and public commentary pour fuel on the fire,” Bowden wrote.
He told Sight he believed that by focusing on the ATAR, society was undervaluing the purpose of preparing young people for the wider world.
“Not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured,” Bowden said in an interview this week.
“The great distorting power of the ATAR is, it is so easily measured and so we gravitate to it, until it becomes the measure – and it’s really not,” Bowden said.
In his newsletter article, Bowden told the school parent body and wider community the focus on the ATAR “diminishes the purpose of education and the purpose of teaching” and this was particularly so for Trinity which had a Christian ethos at its heart.
“In focusing on the ATAR, we lose sight of the fact that the purpose of education is to prepare young people for future life, broadly understood,” he said.
Most importantly, he said education “prepares people to be life-long learners, so that they are equipped to thrive in the changing circumstances of their future lives”.
“In the context of our particular School, the commendation of the Christian faith as a sure foundation and invaluable orientation to life is central to our educational vision. The ATAR number reflects none of these purposes.”
Indeed, on the school website, Bowden tells the parents of would-be students their sons will be offered extensive co-curricular and curriculum choices and will be expected to participate in “mandatory” sports not to teach them how to succeed, but how to “fail and grow”. He said the ease, convenience and apparent simplicity of attaching a four-digit number to indicate what success, or what school, is about did not take into account the formation of a person.
“It’s [the ATAR] one measure amongst many, but the trouble is it becomes the default proxy that the success of a school gets measured against. I think what all educators would want to say is [that] school is so much more than that and a Christian educator says [that] in addition to school being so much more than that, we have that overlay of Christian mission in what we do, which is: we want to be commending the Faith as well and that’s not something which will be captured in the ATAR or any other measure.”
Bowden’s newsletter article followed discussions with former Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Professor Peter Shergold, who is chancellor of the University of Western Sydney and chair of the NSW Educational Standards Authority, and who recently conducted a review of senior secondary education.
“According to Shergold, students with an ATAR over 90 will be fine at university, those with an ATAR under 65 will struggle, but the ATAR provides almost no predictive quality for the mass of students between 65 and 90. For these students, we only know how they will go at university once they actually go!”
There were other ways to conceive of and perceive success, Bowden said, such as the International Baccalaureate Learner Profile, which sets out 10 attributes that were valued and cultivated at all levels of the school, including Thinkers, Communicators, Risk-takers and Balanced.
“We have different things in mind that we think about beyond the ATAR.” Bowden said among his counterparts at independent schools, discussing the ATAR, school rankings and Higher School Certificate results was a perennial issue.
“We curse, in a way, the league tables which come out because there’s so much they don’t capture. But again, because they’re so easy to look at and to understand, they make it appear so simple. It’s very difficult to see how they would be gotten rid of.”
He said they were in regular talks with the University Admissions Centre, which processes university admissions, and listening to them as they also reflect on the future of the ATAR.
“What Peter Sherwood said to me which was a surprise to me, was that fewer than 40 per cent of the students going to university get there on the basis of ATAR alone. So it’s actually becoming less significant.
“It’s actually not as important as it once was in doing the job it was designed to do.”
