ATAR ideology.
A reflective resource for school leaders and teachers.
It has been encouraging to see a lot of talk about the ATAR lately. There are many calling for a rethink of the tool and wrestling with the important work of how we might be able to move forward in order to more closely align school practice in the final years of schooling with our hopes for young Australians as a whole.
On LinkedIn I ended up collating my three posts on ATAR ideology into a single PDF resource of three chapters to support teachers and school leaders who may want a starting point for thinking about the problems inherent within the use of the ATAR as an educational tool.
Considering the positive conversations that are currently taking place at the moment and the feedback I received on the resource, I figured it would be worth resharing this again as a single post for readers to return back to or share with their colleagues.
Chapter 1
Learning to compete
What teachers can do, with their students, is create new possibilities, build paths into regions that have never been explored before - Raewyn Connell
Looking back.
I want you to imagine the end of another school year.
With it comes another cohort of final year secondary school students sent out into the “real world”, as they received their study scores, along with their Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) and find their way into the various different opportunities that Australian society has to offer. The ATAR is a number between 0 and 99.95 that ranks students in relation to one another, as a means of supporting universities with admission selection to various courses. It is also worth noting:
The average ATAR is usually around 70.00. If every school student went on to achieve an ATAR, the average ATAR would be 50.00. But because some students leave school early and the ones who stay on to receive an ATAR are a smaller, more academically able group, the average ATAR is higher (UAC, 2024, para. 2).
With no hesitation whatsoever, the media is often quick to present stories of “top performing” students and schools, despite claims that ATAR scores are only used by 25% of young Australians. The Guardian released an article that attempted to downplay the power of the ATAR by profiling a small selection of individuals who managed to succeed professionally despite their poor final year result. Understandably, these kinds of articles never seem to meet reality for a number of individuals and so often fall flat. Discrediting a powerful cultural tool is not always as simple as claiming its meaninglessness with a few privileged voices.
This is the first chapter in a resource for school leaders, teachers and the broader community, exploring the ideological nature of the ATAR in Australian schooling and its implications for those with a stake in education. Over the next three chapters, I will not sing the ATAR’s praises, nor will I attempt to discredit its power in today’s society. I wish to instead explore the way that the ATAR, in ideologically framing education as a competition, holds the potential to limit our, as well as our student’s, understanding of education and as a consequence, life in society.
In short, I seek to briefly problematise the ATAR in order to question its desirability as an educational tool.
In this chapter, I will briefly explore the way that the ATAR has ideologically framed education as a competition and discuss some of the implications of this for teachers and their students.
Somebody has to fail.
I will always remember one lesson I had as a high school student, where a teacher well known for their rather wild nature and unpredictability stood in as a substitute teacher for our class one day. This teacher taught economics, was outspoken and (as some might say) “politically incorrect”. Most feared him, he spoke with cold authority. He gave the impression that he’d seen more of the world than you and you believed it.
You either took his word or kept quiet.
I can recall the rough location in the school and my approximate age, but the most lasting memory of the lesson was something this teacher said to the class when discussing economics. He explained that in the world there would always be what he called a “s*** pile”. In fact, this was necessary. He then acted at the front of the class as if he were hiking up a mountain and went on to explain that: “there needs to be a ‘s*** pile’ for the rest of us to stand on”. Even as a young boy, I didn’t need anyone to connect the dots for me.
In our current system of standardisation, “high performers” can only exist with a metaphorical “s*** pile” (please excuse the crass). Schooling structures, such as the ATAR, ensure young people are pitted against each other in an academic competition to present their worth as contributors to society. The final year for our school students is not a story about their growth, personal achievements, character or integrity. It is not even about performance.
It is a story of their performance in relation to their peers. The latter is key here. If we decide that we want to normally distribute the performance of students, which “we” have, then it doesn’t matter if all students are receiving a “world-class” education (whatever that means). Standardising our student data to a normal distribution requires that 50% are below average and 50% are above average1. It does not matter whether our final year students are meeting the requirements of their courses to a satisfactory (or even to an exemplary) level, as the normal distribution still requires a rank from lowest to highest student. What it does mean is that we create winners and losers. The idea that if you work hard in your final year of schooling it will pay off is only a reality if you take somebody else’s place in the educational race that “we” have set up and continue to perpetuate. This is the official framing of the ATAR, which can be witnessed in the University Admissions Centre’s informational video, which declares “your ATAR is your rank in the HSC race”.
This goes the same for teachers too. I recall a mentor of mine would often say, “every teacher across the state is providing their students with a 30-study score”, so our teachers (and schools) find themselves continually pressured to provide more. Often coined as a “point of difference”, this can equate to more one-to-one time outside class, more exam study sessions, more exam practice, more (dare I say it) direct instruction. Just in an effort to push over the average. It’s a tiring hill to climb on an already beaten track.
This is one of the core ethical issues with schools chasing (not to mention boasting of) higher median study scores. In order for one school to increase their median study score, another school must decrease in their relative performance. It is a zero-sum game2.
In short, somebody has to fail.
Balancing the scales.
As I feel with most educational practices and issues, I’m not about to say at this point that the ATAR must be scrapped. My concern is not so much in trying to prove that the ATAR is “unfair” or that it must be completely replaced. Considering our current technological age of generative artificial intelligence, it seems that prior calls for a move towards “narrative evaluation” is likely to be unhelpful. “Learner profiles” have been suggested as an ATAR alternative, but seem burdensome for teachers in an educational system so constrained by explicit measurement of prescribed curriculum outcomes. Professor Rachel Wilson states that “we will always need a system for sorting when it comes to the provision of very high, and very expensive levels of education like university”, so it is possible as some argue that the ATAR may in fact be the best we can do practically when it comes to supporting universities in selecting students for their courses. I’m not even necessarily interested in making a more “equitable” measure to support entry into university in this resource, although I will gladly encourage this work to continue. My main concern arises in the way that the ideological nature of the ATAR, in framing education as a competition, has particular socialisation effects that hold the potential to shape the thinking and practice of teachers, students and communities towards an impoverished understanding of educational aims and purposes.
This is something I believe we need to consider seriously.
I have problems with the way the ATAR has become the yard stick to which schools pride themselves on and the measure to which teachers of senior years judge their worth. It is my contention that our focus has continued to be on the ATAR itself as an object, rather than considering the way that it contributes to the subjectivities of those it comes into contact with. Ultimately, when left unexamined or uncritically accepted, the ATAR may in fact hinder the educational aims we have for Australian schooling.
In Chapter 2, I aim to explore the implications of this ideological framing of education in a broader sense than how students understand their final years of schooling. The ATAR will be interrogated as a tool that does not simply rank individuals, but similar to the concept of the “hidden curriculum” holds the potential to powerfully shape Australian teachers and their students.
Chapter 2
The competitive society
We must also remember that our institutions are designs and that our designs are hostage to our understanding, perspectives, and theories - Etienne Wenger
More than a number.
In Chapter 1, I explored the way that the ATAR, explicitly and ideologically, frames the final year of schooling and education more broadly as a competition. By ranking final year students in relation to their peers as the core mechanism to define the overall quality of individuals (both students and teachers), “we” continue to perpetuate a system where somebody has to fail (be it students and/or teachers).
So, as I would argue, we need to see the ATAR as more than a number. It can be understood as revealing ideological bias towards particular visions of education and society more broadly. It decides who wins and who loses, who is worthy and who is worthless. These visions act as a kind of “hidden curriculum”, which can be understood as “the tacit teaching of social and economic norms and expectations to students in schools” (Apple, 2018, p. 46). The hidden curriculum remains an unspoken but powerful shaping force that has the potential to influence the way teachers and students relate to one another and exist in the world. With this in clear(er) sights, we may have a better chance at interrupting its effects.
In this chapter, I seek to explore the implications of the ATAR as an educational tool more broadly. That is, I wish to highlight the way that the ATAR, as a dominant cultural tool in schooling, holds the potential to powerfully shape Australian teachers and their students.
The fear of losing.
Ideological perspectives that consider competition in education as a means of achieving progress are hard to escape in the current educational climate. Indeed, we are often bombarded by competitive phrases in educational discourse, such as being “left behind” and “falling behind” (I’m sure you could think of some others) used as a means of constructing crisis in schooling or teaching to justify reform3. More recently in discussing the state of education in the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak boasted that progress is being made by referring to the UK “outperforming” Scotland and Wales in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings4. It is not necessarily “bad” to discuss education in terms of “progress” (however defined), but these kinds of discussions do distract from considering desirable purposes and aims of schooling and education5. What seems to be of most importance in current educational discourse is that we, be it our students, teachers, schools and society at large, are not losing.
Similar to the effects of other comparative standardised measures such as PISA and the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), the ATAR is tangled up in ideologies of competition. The dominance and status given to the ATAR as an educational tool has exacerbated a fear of losing amongst students, teachers and school communities. As a result, school communities increasingly seek to engage in “perverse” practices to improve their chances of “winning” (Lingard and Sellar, 2013), in order to achieve more positive perceptions amongst the public6.
Sadly, as mentioned in Chapter 1, if it is not your children’s school that is perceived to be failing, it will be someone else’s. The ATAR is a zero-sum game, where somebody has to lose. In drawing our focus to ensure we’re not “losing”, we may begin to lose sight of what it is we really hope to achieve through education.
In fact, we may have already lost it.
The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration, which “sets out the national vision for education and the commitment of Australian Governments to improving educational outcomes” (Department of Education, 2022, para. 1), states the following:
Our vision is for a world class education system that encourages and supports every student to be the very best they can be, no matter where they live or what kind of learning challenges they may face (Berry et al., 2019, p. 2).
If this is indeed a consensus of what education ought to be doing in Australia, then it seems to me that the ATAR is simply at odds with this vision.
It is my argument that the ATAR, along with its educational infrastructure, does not simply rank students for entry into tertiary education, but holds the power to shape ways of thinking and being. That is, the ATAR, in framing education as a competition, has a socialising effect upon teachers, students and school communities.
An (un)intended socialisation tool.
Although it makes sense to consider the way that the ATAR contributes to shaping the practice of teachers and students within the school environment, in this chapter I wish to suggest its broader potential influence upon the social. I believe that the ATAR holds powerful socialisation effects, intended or otherwise, upon our teachers, students and school communities.
Schooling can be understood as not simply a place where students develop knowledge of “things” (i.e. facts, skills, etc.), but also functions as a socialising institution that shapes the way students and teachers relate to each other and their world. In this regard, I follow Biesta’s (2010, p. 20) conceptualisation of socialisation, where “through education, we become part of particular social, cultural and political ‘orders’”. In this way, the ATAR contributes to a hidden curriculum, where our young people become socialised into existing neoliberal cultures of competition.
How does the ATAR do this? Among other things, it implicitly tells our young people that performance determines worth, competition is the way the world works, and that this is a natural and fair process. We could limit our scope to discussing the way such narratives shape the behaviours and identities of students in their final years of schooling, but is it possible that we might see such ideological perspectives as infiltrating and further solidifying such competitive notions of relationships in society?
This doesn’t seem too farfetched to me.
We embed competition into the way we date, watch films and how we choose cafes. Educational journalists rank schools with available NAPLAN data. We incorporate entrepreneurial thinking to the way we present ourselves online, in our work and in our relationships. We compete against our peers and friends for employment. We want the highest price when selling real estate.
Interestingly, younger teachers have been found to be more accepting of neoliberal logics of competition infiltrating their work (Holloway & Brass, 2018), with graduate teachers taking advantage of the teacher shortages by demanding higher beginning salary levels7.
It seems likely to me that the ATAR, as a powerful cultural tool for sorting students in their final years, has a greater impact on our young people than we might expect. By reifying competition as a natural way of existing in and with the world, the ATAR holds the potential to powerfully shape the kinds of people our schools encounter and release into the world every year.
None of this is really a problem.
Unless you are losing.
In third and final chapter of this resource, I will explore the potential for transformation in relation to our relationship with the ATAR and how such transformation might be achieved.
Chapter 3
Transforming ATAR practice
Come and search for we who search and looking for a scarred land.
Turn the soil, weave the dream. Thread the river, rake the sand - Johnny Flynn
An opportunity for transformation.
Firstly, thank you for taking the time to engage with this resource. If you have some thoughts you would like to share, please don’t hesitate to reach out via email or other means. If your school is actively challenging the socialisation effects of the ATAR, I’d love to hear about it. For myself, it certainly has been a helpful exercise to engage deeply with an area of Australian educational practice that is often left unexamined until the end of each year8.
Over the past two chapters, I have tried to illuminate the way that the ATAR ideologically frames education as a competition where some “win”, but others have to “lose”. Therefore, any success achieved by our students is always at the expense of another. By developing a stronghold over common perceptions of educational quality, the ATAR cultivates a pervasive fear of losing amongst teachers, their students and school communities. This fear of losing impacts on the identity and practice of teachers in profound (and sometimes perverse) ways that ought not to be ignored. The ATAR, as I have tried to argue, is not simply a sorting mechanism that ranks students from worst to best.
It is also a teacher.
The ATAR, along with many other schooling structures and practices, socialises our young people into certain ways of being in the world. I have argued that the ATAR implicitly tells our young people that performance determines worth, competition is the way the world works, and that this is a natural and fair process. Considering the status and power attributed to the ATAR in the final year of schooling for our young people, we can expect the ATAR to contribute to the acculturation of school students into a world where competition becomes the normal and natural way of existing in and with the world.
The question we should then be asking is whether we believe that a world like this is a desirable one for our children to exist in. If we begin to feel uncomfortable with the potential implications of the ATAR on Australia’s young people (who will become the next generation of citizens in our democratic society), then you’re in good company.
In this chapter, I suggest that transformation of our relationship with the ATAR begins with a reflexive disposition that considers the ideological nature of the tool9. When school leaders and teachers reflexively engage with educational tools such as the ATAR, it is my argument that they are able to more effectively construct spaces that resist their effects. I do wish to reiterate that this chapter is not about claiming that the ATAR needs to be replaced10, but rather reiterate that what must change is our relationship with it.
Reflexivity and the ATAR.
Ryan and Webster (2019) describe reflexivity as distinct from reflection in the way that our “own beliefs, understanding and habits are being examined” (p. 65). This kind of reflection not only attempts to consider change in our practices, but also change in our attitudes, beliefs and perspectives. Reflexivity can support us in determining whether our desires and intentions in our practice have “simply been absorbed unconsciously or fatalistically from the dominating ideologies of society or whether they are authentically chosen” (ibid., p. 73). Furthermore, reflexivity “requires engaging with issues beyond the classroom such as moral, social and political aspects of one’s culture, giving consideration to issues such as equity and emancipation and how these might influence our classroom practice” (ibid., p. 75).
The ATAR has become somewhat of a cultural beast in Australian education. The status and power given to the metric has arguably led to the acceptance of its appropriateness in determining educational quality (whether of students, teachers or schools). Reflexivity can thus assist us to interrogate whether our relationship with the ATAR has been “authentically chosen” or absorbed via dominant educational cultures.
If we believe it is necessary to transform our relationship with the ATAR, then engaging in reflexivity is the first step in this process. Reflexivity allows for important deliberation to occur, where school communities can begin to develop a greater sense of alignment between the desires they have for education and their practices, in spite of the ideological forces at play.
In reference to the work of Philippe Meirieu, Biesta (2019) argues that:
Education has a duty to resist the desires society projects onto it. This is not in order to just say no to those desires, but in order to raise the question to what extent those desires are going to help or hinder the work education needs to take care of for its own sake, so to speak (p. 2).
In relation to the ATAR, school leaders and teachers must then consider whether the desire for universities to rank their students from worst to best is going to help or hinder the work of the school.
What do you think?
Though policy changes have their place, this is a call to action for school communities, including leaders, teachers, parents, and students to intentionally engage with the way that the ATAR impacts on our perspectives of what education is and can be.
Change the metric.
I have had many conversations with VCE teachers over the years who find themselves perpetually disheartened by their end-of-year VCE student’s results. Great teachers. Passionate teachers who year after year teach well.
But somebody has to lose.
In contrast, I have seen schools pat themselves on the back and celebrate increasing their school’s average ATAR scores. Commonly at the expense of other schools in the district.
After all, somebody has to lose.
I wish to reiterate something here. Study scores and the ATAR are a measure of comparison not quality. However, comparison and quality are often conflated in educational discourse, such as in the continual media cycles surrounding Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) league table hysteria, so it should be of no surprise when we see the ATAR used as a way of constructing educational quality. But quality does not need be defined through comparison. For example, we could measure the quality of a VCE program by how well students were able to meet their learning goals, their learning growth, or by their satisfaction in their schooling experience. Although these are some beginning suggestions for how we might be able to change our relationship to the ATAR, I do not seek to provide the answer for where we should be turning our gaze away from it.
This is a something each schooling community must decide for themselves.
How quality is determined all depends on how specific school communities understand the purpose and aims of education. Therefore, upon reflexively engaging upon the implications of the ATAR, we may find that it does not support our specific school vision (or the national vision for education for that matter). In this case, it will be worth turning our eyes toward some other determinant of school quality.
I think it’s time to change the metric.
In this resource, I have attempted to lay bare the ideological aspects of the ATAR and its socialisation effects for schools and society more broadly. The aim of this series has been an attempt to “(re)direct”, in the words of Biesta (2021, p. 87), reader’s, including my own, attention toward their beliefs and values for education in light of the ideological perspectives grounding the ATAR.
Although interrogating the equity of the ATAR as an appropriate tool for supporting universities in the selection of candidates for graduate courses is an important discussion to be having, it is my conviction that we need to have more robust dialogue surrounding the impact of the ATAR upon the identities and subjectivities of students and teachers.
The ATAR may continue to remain a powerful cultural tool, yet we still have a choice to make in relation to how we respond to and challenge its claims about individual and collective worth.
The first step it to put the ATAR, with all its ideological biases, out on the table for all to see.
References
Apple, M., & Apple, M. W. (2018). Ideology and curriculum. Taylor & Francis Group.
Berry, Y., Tehan, D., Mitchell, S., Uibo, S., Grace, G., Gardner, J., Rockliff, J., Merlino, J., Ellery, S. (2019). Alice Springs (Mparntwe)Education Declaration. Council of Australian Governments.
Biesta, G. (2010). Good education in an age of measurement : Ethics, politics, democracy. Taylor & Francis Group.
Biesta, G. (2019). Obstinate education : Reconnecting school and society. Brill.
Holloway, J. & Brass, J. (2018). Making accountable teachers: The terrors and pleasures of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 33(3), 361-382.
Lingard, B., & Sellar, S. (2013). “Catalyst data”: Perverse systemic effects of audit and accountability in Australian schooling. Journal of Education Policy, 28(5), 634–656.
Ryan, A., & Webster, R. S. (2019). Teacher Reflexivity: An Important Dimension of a Teacher's Growth. In W. R. S & J. D. Whelan (Eds.), Rethinking Reflection and Ethics for Teachers.
Universities Admissions Centre. (2024). Australian Tertiary Admission Rank: What is the ATAR?, retrieved 4th January 2024.
If all this talk about the normal distribution is a bit confusing (and if you’re wondering, yes, it is!), please do some research yourself to grapple with this concept. This is a fundamental construction of our current way of thinking about education and it is important that we understand what it really means.
I must thank researcher Sally Larsen for her work and fielding my questions in relation to this.
But don’t worry too much, currently things are looking “good” for Australian education.
It doesn’t look all that great to me, you be the judge 👉 United Kingdom | Factsheets | OECD PISA 2022 results.
As a sidenote, it seems odd to me to celebrate the fact that other countries might be performing worse than your own.
This is unsurprising in light of the way schools are ranked in comparison to one another through websites such as Better Education that boast of “more than 350,000 visitors per month”.
Not to mention quickly forgotten.
If you are reading this resource then this is something you’re already doing! 👏
Although this is not my argument here, I do welcome the calls for change in relation to how universities select their students (such as in this report).
Thanks, Tom. Given that improving ATAR scores is the primary goal of all the schools I’ve worked in, I’m amazed there is so little discussion about it. You make a great point about the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration, which sets out the national vision for education agreed upon by all Education Ministers. Yet, a focus on ATAR seems at odds with this vision. I know I sound like a broken record, but students are voting with their feet, with increasing numbers (toward 20%) choosing not to pursue an ATAR score, indicating it’s not relevant to their lives. I wonder if more students exercised their choice and this number increased to 30%, we might see a revolution in our education system!
I have a student heading in to year 11, and the whole process seems exceedingly complex and not remotely equitable.
I'd also add another dimension that the use of ATAR (and NAPLAN) as as testing tools have become marketing draws for private schools.
Which results in more people going to private schools, because they're "better".
I'd like to see a longitudinal study of how many students in private schools remain in school from enrolment to year 12 completion- how many are "encouraged" to leave or pursue another pathway (particularly those with a disability). How many don't do the NAPLAN.
I have heard a lot of anecdotal evidence across different groups of people, in different locations.
I've seen approaches from schools that seem to have an intense focus on pushing 'b' cohorts into the 'a' cohort - to the detriment of the 'd' and 'c' cohort.
This results in some students internalising the idea that they are "just not A grade students". Now this isn't individual teacher fault (overworked, underfunded) - but that still doesn't make your Econ teacher's (very real) mountain not exist.
It returns, again, to what is education?
What do we want it to be?