Are selective schools good or bad for our kids? Q&A with Associate Professor Philip Parker
Highlights
- Research suggests that increased school selectivity can distort students’ self-belief, lowering confidence in high-achieving environments and inflating it in lower-performing ones.
- Highly selective systems may reduce overall academic performance and limit equal opportunities, particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
- More diverse and inclusive schooling can support balanced self-concept, social development and better outcomes for students across all ability levels.
Selective schooling has had a string of bad publicity of late, with increasing calls for it to be phased out. But new research shows it’s not necessarily selective schools that are the problem — it’s school selectivity. Impact caught up with developmental science researcher Philip Parker to discuss this controversial area.
“Warped and elitist” was how one recent article headlined Australia’s selective schools, while another labelled them “inequitable and unethical”. But the problems with selective schooling may be more complex than many would believe.
Last year, ACU’s world-renowned educational psychologist, Professor Herb Marsh, warned the evidence “consistently challenges the assumption” that selective schools benefit academically-gifted children.
More recent research from ACU’s Institute for Positive Psychology and Education (IPPE) has reinforced the theory that the more selective a country’s schools are, the worse its children perform on average.
“Now is not the time to be considering more selective schools,” said the study’s lead researcher, Associate Professor Philip Parker.
“We should be finding ways to ensure our public schools integrate people from a diverse range of backgrounds and ability levels.”
The rise in ‘selectivity’
The movement against selective schooling is not new. In 2002, a landmark review of public education in New South Wales recommended the dismantling of the system to leave only the seven oldest selective high schools in Sydney.
But the recommendation never came to fruition. NSW has the bulk of selective schools in Australia (19 selective and 29 partially selective), while they also exist in much smaller numbers in Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland.
In January this year, there were signs of an ideological shift amongst policymakers when Rob Stokes, the NSW Education Minister, flagged a move towards “inclusive” schooling.
"We need to have public schools that are inclusive of everyone rather than deliberately separate children on the basis that some are gifted and talented and others are not,” Stokes said, adding that there “may be merit in opening up selective schools to local enrolments”.
But while Associate Professor Parker supports any move to limit selective schools, his research shows it’s not necessarily selective schooling that’s the problem; it’s school selectivity.
“I think we get hung up on whether a school is by name selective or not, but in reality there are only about four selective schools in Victoria, a few more in NSW and not many anywhere else,” he said.
Parker argues that private schools are also selective in nature, in that they favour students with wealthy parents by virtue of high fees.
“In Australia we select kids into schools in lots of different ways — we’ve got private schools that favour those with wealthy parents, we have religious schools, we have selectivity by geography — there are lots of ways that schools can consist of kids that all look like each other in terms of their ability levels, and in our research, that's what we have picked out as dangerous.”
So, what are the dangers of increased school selectivity? Impact sat down with Associate Professor Parker to drill down into his research, which drew on evidence from 27 countries.
One of the things you talk about is the ‘Big Fish Little Pond Effect’, which describes the way a student’s belief about how smart they are is distorted by the students around them. Can you explain that for us?
“Let's say you’re an average performer in the country as a whole, you get the average score in NAPLAN but you get selected into a high-achieving school. Chances are that even though you’re an average performer nationwide, you're going to be among the worst performing kids in your year grade, and as a result your academic self-concept is likely to be lower.
If we reverse that and imagine you’re a kid who is economically disadvantaged, who maybe lives in a rural area or lives in western Sydney, and have exactly the same NAPLAN score, chances are that in your school, you’re actually going to be among the top performing kids.
And so you have two kids with exactly the same NAPLAN score, and in one case their self-concept is diminished quite considerably, while in another school their self-concept is a whole lot higher.”
Does that affect those children in different ways?
“What our other research has found is that the more selectivity there is, the more distortion happens to the child’s self concept.
The kids that are in high-performing selective schools feel even worse about themselves because they’re increasingly cut off from information about what they really look like in relation to the country as a whole.
Meanwhile, the kids who are in low performing schools develop an unrealistically positive view of themselves because they're cut off from experiencing what the true top performers look like.
So what we find is the more selectivity a country has, the bigger the Big Fish Little Pond Effect will be and the more distorted the self-beliefs are of the children in that country.”
