If you have a teenager, you already feel the pressure of the single number they are funnelled towards.
Here is something worth knowing: the people who design the education system have spent nearly a decade quietly agreeing that the number was never the whole story.
As these agreements have occurred, two changes have emerged that are important to know.
The review that named the ATAR problem
In 2020, a national review led by Professor Peter Shergold looked at the final years of school and reached a blunt conclusion.
We had built a system that funnels almost everything toward one rank, the ATAR, even though most students won’t take a purely academic path.
Worse, it hands young people a false choice: academic or vocational, as if picking one makes you less serious than the other.
His central recommendation was a Learner Profile: a young person should leave school with evidence of the whole of what they can do, not just a rank.
The number can stay. It just shouldn’t be the only thing that speaks for your child.
The people already building it
That idea is no longer theory. Professor Sandra Milligan’s team at the University of Melbourne is building the Learner Profile and running it in real schools right now.
Their line is simple: measure what’s valued, so that what’s valued can be learned.
Here’s the difference it makes. The old focus was one line: ATAR 74.3. A rank, and nothing about the person. The Learner Profile is a portrait: a strong collaborator, a developing critical thinker, highly self-directed, still growing in confidence. Each with evidence behind it telling more than a score.
An ATAR tells you where your child sits in a queue. The other shines a light on who they are.
What this means at your kitchen table
Most students will still graduate on the ATAR for now, and the Learner Profile is being using with early adopter, pilot schools, not everywhere. But the direction is clear.
The certificate is changing, the measurement is being rebuilt, and the reformers are saying out loud what you’ve felt all along.
The gap is that the structure is moving faster than the culture. The system is quietly widening its definition of success while the November scoreboard, and the dinner-table question, haven’t caught up.
You don’t have to wait for them.
You can talk to your child today as though they are more than a score because the evidence, and the people building the system, already say they are.
One idea like this, every fortnight.
One Small Shift is our free fortnightly newsletter for parents where we share one practical ideas, action or step to help you have better conversations and redefine success with those around you.
Till the next one,
Dan Steele
More Than a Score