Selective school fail: Why NSW has lost control of the beast it created
Just for a moment, climb inside the head of a nine or 11-year-old sitting this year's selective education exam.
A heavy responsibility sits on your pint-sized shoulders. You've spent years of Saturdays at tutoring, sacrificing chunks of your childhood to prepare for a test that's desperately important to your parents, and that has consumed vast amounts of your family's financial and emotional resources. You believe your future rides on whether you do well enough to win a place in a sought-after selective school or opportunity class.
The day arrives. You're racked with nerves. You cram as you're driven to the test, like an athlete warming up for an Olympic qualifier. When you arrive, you're enveloped by chaos. Computers crash, kids are crying, hundreds of frantic adults swarm, riot police push through the crowd, people are shouting orders into loudspeakers and staff search for lost children. Perhaps worst of all, you worry you've messed up the test.
'[The children] were sitting at their desks with their hands on their ears, so many of them crying,' said one adult at the Canterbury test centre.
The debacle of this year's selective school test was a manifestation of everything that's wrong with the NSW selective school system – traumatised children, desperate parents and a Department of Education that has lost control of the beast it created.
This needs to be a galvanising moment – the final nail in the coffin for NSW's radical, failed experiment in gifted education. We have known for a long time that the selective system offers no academic benefit to the students of NSW and may be causing some of them harm. It's time to stop prioritising the aspirations of politicians and parents and to focus on the interests of children. It's time for serious and significant reform.
Victoria has four selective schools. Western Australia has one. NSW has 42 (some fully, some partially) – a number that ballooned since the 1980s (when there were just seven) because both sides of government formed the view they'd be a good way to win votes and keep middle-class families in the public education system. They were wrong. It has had the opposite effect.
By taking top-performing students out of comprehensive public schools and turning selective schools into a prize, the government has created what parents now perceive as a two-tier system of premium and second-rate public schooling.
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