Blandford Primary Gets Top Marks

BLANDFORD Primary School was a stand out in the Upper Hunter in data released this week by researchers at Macquarie University into national NAPLAN results for year 5 reading ranking schools ‘below’, ‘close to’ or ‘above’ the national average.

See Upper Hunter school rankings below. 

They initially found that socio-economics with postcode correlated to school results, but explained in regional areas things are more complex, said Crichton Smith PhD candidate, Faculty of Business and Economics at Macquarie University who conducted the research as part of his PhD.

“There is disparity within the area, so it is not as simple as postcode,” said Mr Smith.

“The research was to look at the whole of Australia and initially it wasn’t about the cities it was about metropolitan and non-metropolitan in Australia,” he said.

“What we were seeing was there wasn’t a homogenous non-metropolitan Australia and in different locations there are different reasons.

“Imagine if you are up the far north-west of Western Australia it would be an entirely different circumstances with indigenous populations and mining and the like, if you are more coastal towards Byron Bay that will be a different dynamic as well.

“We were just looking at where the schools were located, so we don’t know which students were going to these schools and where they were coming from.

“If we are trying to reduce inequality then you have to drill down to the local environment.

“We don’t know the reasons why but I’m going to guess that in Scone they are different to Newcastle or further up the road,” he said.

“It’s not as simple as the teachers, the principal or the students that year…because it’s hard to believe that the whole of the North Shore of Sydney that every year those kids are the brightest in Sydney,” laughed Crichton Smith.

The researchers looked at schools over a period of time that were consistently ‘below’, ‘close to’ or ‘above’ the national average.

“Once you move out of the city the size of the town was considered and if there were areas where all of the schools were all above the national average or all below and unless it was quite a large inland city of 50,000 people the chances of all the schools being above just wasn’t there,” he said.

“We did find some very, very small schools were above the national average, so why are those schools doing so well, maybe it’s a class size of four kids who knows,” he said.

“It is interesting that in Singleton they’re above the national average when other schools aren’t and so the question is what can be learnt from those or are they significantly different from other schools in some way.

“We don’t know we were not trying to find why, this was the first stage to see what was happening and now I’ll go away and look at the demographics of the teaching workforce – are they different in Muswellbrook to Newcastle or Sydney’s North Shore?

“You’re not that far away from the city, but I also know how hard it can be to get teachers in those areas and retain teachers and we all know it is a highly feminised workforce and if you are moving a teacher to Scone or Muswellbrook or more remote towns, you are not just moving them you are moving their husbands; then multiply it for how hard it would be more remote – you’re in what would be considered quite a desirable area in regional New South Wales,” he said.

There are many factors at play here and many of those factors are outside of the school,” Crichton Smith said.

Sandra Coffey, relieving principal at Blandford Primary School agrees there are many factors behind her students performing so well.

“I really like small schools and our teachers do a really good job preparing the students to enter primary school

“We have a really good writing program we are using and on Friday’s we have all morning at writing stations and focus on writing, or editing and the range of writing skill tasks to given them knowledge of all the different processes that it takes for them doing their writing.

“I think the staff are very hard working and very centred on the children – we have high expectations and we have parents that are really on board, very supportive and they help them with their homework,

In their latest achievement, Ms Coffey was humble with their success and said, “we’ve had a lot of good things happen this year, children going to state swimming, state relay teams and we were chosen to go down to the Invictus Games, so it has been a good year.”

Ranking for Year 5 reading:

• Aberdeen Public School, Aberdeen – Below
• Blandford Public School, Blandford – Above
• Denman Public School, Denman – Close to
• Martindale Public School, Martindale – Below
• Merriwa Central School, Merriwa – Below
• Murrurundi Public School, Murrurundi – Below
• Muswellbrook Public School, Muswellbrook – Below
• Muswellbrook South Public School, Muswellbrook – Below
• St James’ Primary School, Muswellbrook – Close to
• St Joseph’s Primary School, Denman – Above
• St Joseph’s Primary School, Merriwa – Close to
• St Mary’s Primary School, Scone – Close to
• Scone Grammar School, Scone – Close to
• Scone Public School, Scone – Below