Australia Yearbook - 2001

Chapter 10—Education and training 443
introduction of new school legislation in 1961
and the implementation of the ‘scheme’ between
1962 and 1964, suggest something of the process
and pace of major school reform in Australia.
New South Wales’ planners had to accommodate
serious opposition from within the State
Government’s ranks, from the social elite who
had graduated from the State’s selective schools,
from teachers’ industrial and professional
associations, and from some elite private schools
and university academics. Ultimately the reforms
were accepted by the education community
because they preserved aspects of the traditional
systems, while laying the template for the
structure of today’s secondary education in NSW.
In contrast, the Queensland Government was
able to dispense with its obsolete State secondary
system within three years. Its Education Act 1964
raised the minimum school leaving age to 15,
abolished the primary school scholarship
examination and the university’s control over
most of the secondary school curriculum, and
encouraged the growth of comprehensive State
high schools.
Nevertheless, this transformative period of
“secondary schooling for all” should not be
identified with equality of educational
opportunities through extended access to
secondary education. The conservation of the
all-pervasive academic curriculum, the
persistence of external examinations, still largely
based on competitive selection for university, and
the role of the Commonwealth and States’
financial aid to non-elite private schools, and
especially for Roman Catholic schools to
modernise their curriculum and teaching, meant
that participation and success in public secondary
schooling were highly differentiated by social
geography and gender. Thus despite the rapid
expansion of high school facilities and resources
in Victoria between 1950 and 1975, social
inequalities within the State system prevailed.
Studies of Melbourne’s high schools by Teese
(1989) claim that, for 1972, completion rates for
secondary schooling were 25% lower for students
attending schools in the working class suburbs
than for those attending schools in middle class
locations. Moreover, for both locations, girls had
completion rates that were half those of boys,
suggesting that girls were still being ‘ghettoed’
into terminal streams in high schools, and
dropping out of school earlier and more
frequently than boys.
Universal secondary
education?
The increase in secondary education capacity
across all sectors between the late 1960s and
late 1970s offered portents of a second silent
revolution in education towards the end of
the century. Specifically, the restructuring of
the Australian secondary school, especially in
curriculum and teaching, and the funding of
these changes by the States and the
Commonwealth, could provide the
springboard for the introduction of universal
secondary education in Australia, i.e. the
level of education where almost all 16–17
year olds stayed on at schooling, either at
secondary schools, alternative educational
sites or programs, or in a combination of
part-time education, training and work.
Secondary schooling underwent its most
pronounced forms of modernisation in this
period. Public examination reform both
reflected this process and was affected by it,
especially in the large number of students
who remained at secondary school, where
once their cohort would have exited full-time
schooling at the end of Year 10. The notable
reforms of this period included the abolition
of external examinations except for the final
year, a shift towards school-based
examinations, including recognition of
alternative curriculum pathways, and the
introduction or extension of school system
certification. Furthermore the use of external
assessment was modified by a mix of external
and teacher-based school assessment, with
much more emphasis on ongoing
assessment and moderation of standards by
teacher peers in conjunction with an
examination by authorities. In the latter,
Queensland hosted the most radical reforms,
while other States moved more slowly, if
at all.
The dismantling or partial dismantling of
public examinations systems indicated a
newfound trust by authorities in the
professionalism of secondary school
teachers. This had been assisted by the
recognition that for the first time these
teachers were adequately prepared
professionally for teaching by the universities
and the teachers’ colleges, the latter now
free of education department control. There
was also a recognition that professional
development time was available for teachers,