Board of Senior Secondary Studies

Overview

The Board of Senior Secondary Studies (the Board) was established in 1991 and the Board of Senior Secondary Studies Act 1997 (the BSSS Act) was enacted in January 1998.

The key functions of the Board are to:

• provide students with Year 12 Certificates, Tertiary Entrance Statements and vocational certificates
• maintain the credibility and acceptance of courses through a regular accreditation program
• monitor and support the validity of assessment in years 11 and 12
• improve the comparability of standards across the Territory through moderation procedures
• gain the widest possible recognition for the credentials awarded by the Board
• service the information needs of the community.

Board membership

The BSSS Act (s8) creates a board with a broad membership of 14 from the many stakeholders in senior secondary education. Members, other than the Director- General of the Education and Training Directorate, are appointed by the Minister for Education and Training for a period of up to three years. Members can be reappointed if they are still eligible. The appointments of two members and the Board Chair expired in December 2010. Also, one member resigned at the end of 2010. Professor Parker was reappointed Board Chair for 2011. One member has been reappointed and two new members appointed in 2011.

Table BSSS 1: Board membership as at 1 July 2010

Source: Board of Senior Secondary Studies

The Board has six scheduled meetings each calendar year. The above Board met on three occasions from July-December 2010.

Details of Board members in 2010

Professor Stephen Parker (Chair)
Professor Parker is the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra. Professor Parker is a lawyer by profession and has worked in the higher education sector for many years. He has also chaired the board of a state secondary school.

Qualifications: LLB (Hons), PhD

Ms Kaye O'Hara
Ms O'Hara was Deputy Chief Executive, Academic at the Canberra Institute of Technology. Ms O'Hara has worked as an educator and manager in the TAFE system since 1978. Prior to this she was a teacher in ACT secondary schools.

Qualifications: BA, Grad Dip Ed, Dip Continuing Ed, Grad Cert Ed Management, MEd

Ms O'Hara resigned from the Board in December 2010.

Ms Jocelyn Vasey
Ms Vasey was the Director, Training and Tertiary Education in the Education and Training Directorate to the end of April 2010. She has considerable experience in teaching and administration in the secondary and tertiary education sectors, and has maintained her interest and involvement in these areas through her role as Chair of the Board's Vocational Education and Training Committee, as well as community and consultation work.

Qualifications: BA, Dip Ed, Dip Special Ed, MEd

Professor Joan Beaumont
Professor Beaumont is Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University (ANU). Prior to joining ANU, she was Dean of Arts (and Education) at Deakin University. Her key research interests are in the history of Australia at war.

Qualifications: BA (Hons), PhD, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia

Professor Louise Watson
Professor Watson is involved in education policy in the Faculty of Education, University of Canberra. She has undertaken research in education policy in a wide range of areas, including quality schooling, performance measurement and educational leadership.

Qualifications: BA (Hons), MA, PhD

Ms Rita Daniels
Ms Daniels is the Principal of Daramalan College and was previously Principal of St Clare's College. She was a member from 2000 to 2003 and from 2004 to 2006, chairing the Board's Assessment and Certification, and Discipline committees. She has been teaching since 1977.

Qualifications: BA, Dip Ed, MEd

Ms Jan Bentley
Ms Bentley is Executive Teacher, Mathematics and Technology at Dickson College. She has over 40 years' experience in teaching mathematics in colleges and high schools in the ACT, and has been involved in course development for ACT colleges since 1974. She was recognised in 2009 with an Australian Education Union Public Education Award.

Qualifications: BA, Dip Ed, Dip in Using Computers in Education

Mrs Alison Jeffries
Mrs Jeffries has been Principal of St Clare's College since 2009. Prior to that she worked in Human Resources and Education Services in the Catholic Education Office and in various schools, including MacKillop Catholic College ACT and St Anne's Central School, NSW.

Qualifications: BEd (Dist), MEd, M Cath Ed, Grad Cert in Ed Law, Cert IV Assessment
and Workplace Training

Mr Martin Watson
Mr Watson is Principal, University of Canberra Senior Secondary College Lake Ginninderra and was acting Principal and Deputy Principal at the college prior to that appointment. He has over 20 years' experience in ACT high schools and colleges.

Qualifications: BA, Grad Dip Ed

Ms Josephine DixonMs Dixon has worked in computing in various government departments and has taught computing at the Canberra Institute of Technology. She was a member of the Board's Assessment and Certification Committee from 2006 to 2009.

Qualifications: BA Comp Studies, MEd, Grad Dip Information Science, Workplace Assessor

Ms Kirsten Wilkinson
Ms Wilkinson has worked at the Australian Bureau of Statistics either full or part- time for 21 years currently as a Collection Manager for survey work. Prior to this she gained a teaching degree and has worked in primary schools in the ACT.

Qualifications: BEd, Dip Teaching

Dr Christopher Peters AM
Dr Peters is the Chief Executive of the ACT and Region Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Dr Peters represents business on numerous ACT Government boards and committees, and is on the board of several public companies and community organisations.

Qualifications: Dip Corporate Directors, Honorary Doctor of the University of Canberra, Senior Fellow Corporate Directors Association, Fellow Australian Institute Company Directors, Fellow Australian Institute of Management, Chartered Director

Mr Peter van Rijswijk
Mr van Rijswijk is a teacher at St Francis Xavier College and has worked in ACT and Victorian colleges since 1981. He has served on the Board's Media and Drama Accreditation panels and has been a small group moderator.

Qualifications: BEd, Cert IV Assessment and Workplace Training, Cert IV Entertainment

Ms Trish Wilks
Ms Wilks is Director of Learning and Teaching in the Education and Training Directorate. She has had considerable experience as a school principal and teacher, and has been on the boards of several national educational associations.

Qualifications: BA, Dip Ed, Teachers' Certificate, MEd, Associate of the Library Association of Australia, Fellow of the Australian Council for Educational Leaders

Table BSSS 2: Board membership as at 30 June 2011

Source: Board of Senior Secondary Studies

The above Board has met on three occasions from January to June 2011.

Details of Board members in 2011
Twelve members are the same as for 2010. Details of the two new members are provided below.

Ms Carolyn Grayson
Ms Grayson is the Director, Centre for Education Excellence at the Canberra Institute of Technology and was previously Director, Centre for VET Practice at Swinburne University of Technology. She has over 25 years' experience working in the tertiary sector and previously held positions in the Victorian State Training Authority and the Australian National Training Authority.

Qualifications: BArch(Hons), BSci(Hons), Dip Ed

Ms Louise MayoMs Mayo is a Director at Bull&Bear Special Assignments P/L and was a founding Director of the Australian Business Academy. She has been a Member of the ACT Accreditation and Registration Council since 2005, a Steering Committee Member for the Australian College of Educators, and Chair of the Board of Governors at the

McGrath Institute of Business and Technology since 2009. Louise has vast knowledge in training and education curricula for the tertiary/adult sector of education.

Qualifications: BBus, GradDip Bus, MBus, MMgt, DBusAdmin

Appointment and retirement of Board members
The BSSS Act (s8, 10, 12) provides for the appointment and retirement of Board members.

Remuneration for Board members
The Chair is the only member eligible to receive remuneration, at a rate determined by the ACT Remuneration Tribunal.

Financial and internal controls, audit and risk management

The Board has no financial functions under the BSSS Act and does not receive or expend funds in its own right. Funding for the operation of the Board secretariat is provided and reported through the Education and Training Directorate, which also manages audit and risk management functions.

Ethical standards

Prior to appointment, Board members are provided with the Bowen Code of Conduct as a guide to ethical behaviour. Members sign a declaration that they have read and agree to observe the principles of the code, and agree to disclose all conflicts of interest that arise during their term on the Board. The Board meeting agenda has declaration of conflicts of interests as a standing item. ACT public servants on the Board are also bound by the ACT Public Sector Management Act 1994.

Resources available to Board members

The Education and Training Directorate provides secretariat, research and advisory services and access to legal, ministerial, financial and audit services through a memorandum of understanding between the Directorate and the Board.

Board committees

Under the BSSS Act, the Board can appoint the committees it considers appropriate(s6). The major standing committees of the Board are:

• Curriculum Advisory Committee
  To advise the Board on national and ACT curriculum matters and overall direction of curriculum in years 11 and 12
• Assessment and Certification Committee
  To advise the Board on assessment and certification policies and procedures, and overall direction of assessment and certification in years 11 and 12
• Vocational Education and Training Committee
  To advise the Board on vocational education and training issues, particularly those relating to national agreements and post-school linkages with the VET sector; and to provide advice on VET initiatives for secondary education.

Board committees and their membership in 2010
Curriculum Advisory Committee

 Assessment and Certification Committee

 Vocational Education and Training Committee

Board committees and their membership in 2011
Curriculum Advisory Committee

Assessment and Certification Committee

Vocational Education and Training Committee

Corporate and operational plans

Guiding principles

The Board is committed to:

• a general education of high standards providing equal opportunity for all students to the end of year 12
• freedom of choice of courses for students supported by expert advice
• senior secondary college responsibility for course development
• senior secondary college responsibility for the assessment of its students
• shared responsibility for education
• open access to information.

Goal

To provide a high quality curriculum, assessment and certification system that supports:

• all young adults to achieve a Year 12 Certificate or equivalent vocational qualification
• high levels of achievement in literacy and numeracy
• improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged students
• effective transitions from school to post-school pathways.

The Board delivers year 12 certification services to 23 ACT secondary colleges and five overseas schools. Two schools joined the system for the first time in 2011, Brindabella Christian School, which extended to year 11 and the new Gungahlin College.

Achievements under the Key Focus Areas in the Board Strategic Plan 2008-10

An assessment and certification system that caters for all student pathways

Vocational education and training
The Board continues to monitor and respond to local and national initiatives in vocational education and training. The Board's new classification of E courses allows the increasing numbers of students undertaking vocational studies with external registered training organisations (RTOs) to include these in the course requirements for the Year 12 Certificate and Tertiary Entrance Statement. Currently the Board has registered 26 E courses from five external RTOs.

In 2010, principles and processes were also established to allow paid as well as unpaid work to be counted as Structured Workplace Learning and contribute to the ACT Year 12 Certificate, where identified competencies are developed and assessed in the workplace.

A high quality curriculum, assessment and certification system

Curriculum development
The Board has a five-year cycle of curriculum development to ensure that all schools deliver high quality contemporary courses in the senior secondary years. This involves the regular review of BSSS Course Frameworks, which outline the essential concepts and skills to be covered in courses, and the guidelines and standards for assessment and reporting of student outcomes. In 2010-11, course frameworks in Commerce, Business and Client Services, Food and Resource Management and Industrial Technology Trades have been revised and endorsed by the Board. The Board will review the function and structure of course frameworks following finalisation of the senior years' Australian Curriculum.

In the ACT, courses are currently developed by teams of teachers and other professionals with expertise in the area, informed by current research, best practice teaching and national and international curricula. Seventeen teams operated in 2010 developing system-wide courses and 12 teams are currently developing courses for implementation in 2012. These courses are reviewed by expert panels of teachers, representatives from tertiary institutions, industry and the community, which provide advice on accreditation to the Board. A list of the panels that met to consider courses in 2010-11 is included as Appendix A.

Moderation
System-wide moderation provides feedback on the quality and effectiveness of the school-based assessment and consistency in application of grade achievement standards. Following trials in 2010 of alternative moderation processes, the Board decided to maintain the peer review model of moderation with two changes. Firstly, the Board enhanced the leadership role of principals in the process and secondly, the Board introduced a greater focus on quality assessment and the evidence teachers would expect to find in student work for a particular grade. These changes were implemented at Moderation Day 1 in March 2011 and were well received.

Nationally, the Board is working with other boards of studies across Australia exploring possible models of national moderation of achievement standards for when the senior years' Australian Curriculum is implemented. The ACT has provided samples of student work and college teachers to participate in the study.

In addition to moderation of unit grades, the Board conducts the ACT Scaling Test (AST) to support statistical moderation of course scores for tertiary entrance purposes. To enhance the correlation of the AST with college-based scores, the weightings of the components of the test are determined each year. The weightings used at the end of 2010 were: Quantitative component 31 percent, Verbal component 13 percent, Writing Task 22 percent, and Short Response Test 34 percent.

The Board has implemented the recommendations of the 2010 technical review of the AST, resulting in development of Best Practice Guidelines in AST Preparation, adoption of the NAPLAN terminology of persuasive writing for the Writing Task and provision of professional learning for teachers on the inclusion of AST-like items in college assessment. Following investigation, the Board elected to retain the second sitting of the test to ensure maximum possible participation. In line with the

recommendations, the Board also engaged Professor Rob Hyndman to undertake a review of the impact of correlations in the ACT scaling process. On the basis of his analysis, Professor Hyndman concluded that the Board's Other Course Score scaling is robust. However, he recommended increasing the AST weight in the process. The Board has accepted this recommendation and will implement it from 2011.

An informed and effective response to international, national and local initiatives

Australian Curriculum
The Board has facilitated ACT teacher feedback to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) on the draft Australian Curriculum senior courses in English, mathematics, science and history, and the Shaping Papers for the arts and languages. Through its Executive Officer, the Board has also contributed to discussions on the structure and format of achievement standards for the senior years.

Community consultation
The Board facilitates community input through representation on Board committees, course writing teams, accreditation panels, working parties and consultation forums. Groups represented include parents, teachers, principals, tertiary institutions, industry, business and unions.

Year 12 outcomes 2010
Twenty ACT colleges and the CIT Vocational College were involved in the processing of year 12 results at the end of 2010. Five schools located in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Fiji also had year 12 students who were certificated by the Board.

ACT Year 12 Certificates were awarded to 4,343 students. This included 4,246 students enrolled in ACT colleges and the CIT Vocational College, and 97 students enrolled in overseas colleges. Of these students, 2,831 students completed the requirements for an Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) and thus received a Tertiary Entrance Statement (TES). This included 2,749 students enrolled in ACT colleges and the CIT, and 82 students enrolled in overseas colleges.

At the end of 2010, 83 students (47 females, 36 males) studying university extension programs approved by the Board were able to have those studies contribute to their Year 12 Certificate and ATAR. Of the students who completed courses, 11 studied mathematics, 9 physics, 32 chemistry, 17 conservation biology and 15 Japanese. The students came from 19 different colleges. Sixty-eight percent of these students used their scaled H course score in their ATAR.

The proportion of year 12 students achieving an ACT Year 12 Certificate decreased slightly. In 2010, 91.1 percent of year 12 students in ACT colleges achieved an ACT Year 12 Certificate compared with 92.0 percent in 2009.

To achieve an ACT Year 12 Certificate, students are required to study a minimum of 17 standard units, which form at least three accredited courses from different course areas. However, a large majority of students are studying more than the minimum number of units across a broader range of course areas. In 2010, 78.8 percent of Year 12 Certificate receivers completed 20 or more standard units and

78.1 percent of Year 12 Certificate receivers completed five or more accredited courses from different course areas.

Figure BSSS 1 displays the percentage of Year 12 Certificate receivers achieving a TES from 1999 to 2010. In 2010, 65.1 percent of ACT students receiving a Year 12 Certificate also received a TES. This maintains the recent increases over the past four years.

Of the 2,749 students in the ACT who achieved an ATAR, 77.8 percent were above the University of Canberra main round general ATAR cutoff of 65.

Figure BSSS 2 illustrates the range of ATARs across colleges for 2010. For this chart:

• the central line in the box represents the median score
• the block indicates the spread of 50 percent of the scores
• the single vertical line indicates the spread of the next 15 percent of scores
• circles represent individual results in the top 10 percent and bottom 10 percent of scores.

Table BSSS 3 gives the percentage of Year 12 Certificate and TES receivers who completed an accredited course in the nominated areas.

Whilst the minimum number of courses from different course areas required for an ACT TES is two tertiary accredited (T) and/or university extension (H) courses, 66.1 percent of ACT students used scaled course scores from four different course areas in the calculation of their ATAR.

Table BSSS 3 shows that 97.3 percent of ACT Year 12 Certificate receivers and 99.9 percent of TES receivers completed a course in English/English as a second language, and 90 percent of ACT Year 12 Certificate receivers and 93.1 percent of TES receivers completed a course in mathematics. There was an increase in the percentage of students completing courses in the sciences and languages and a decrease in the percentage of ACT Year 12 Certificate and TES receivers completing a course in history and information technology between 2009 and 2010.

The Board recognises the contribution of learning away from the classroom on a student's Year 12 Certificate. In 2010, 631 students received a Year 12 Certificate with activities recognised under Recognition of Outside Learning. These included sporting and cultural activities and community involvement.

The Board issues vocational certificates to years 10 and 12 students who have completed vocational qualifications through colleges as RTOs. In 2010, this included 513 year 10 students and 743 year 12 students. Of these 1256 students, 49 completed an Australian School-Based Apprenticeship with their college as the RTO.

Figure BSSS 3 displays the number of students receiving vocational certificates issued by the Board for each RTO by year level in 2010. It should be noted that students may have received more than one vocational certificate.

In addition to vocational studies undertaken during years 11 and 12 in colleges, vocational programs undertaken with external RTOs can contribute to the requirements for year 12 certification and be included on the ACT Year 12 Certificate. In 2010, under new Board policy, vocational qualifications achieved through an external RTO and registered by the Board were recognised on the Year 12 Certificate as an E course. In 2010 three students were awarded an E course. The E courses were in the areas of Children's Services, Design and Plumbing.

In 2010:

• 72 students received recognition on their Year 12 Certificate for vocational qualifications awarded by an RTO other than their home college
• 225 students who undertook an Australian School-based Apprenticeship with an external RTO received recognition for it on their Year 12 Certificate.

Students may receive recognition for more than one vocational qualification completed with external RTOs.

For more information contact:
The Executive Officer
Board of Senior Secondary Studies
GPO Box 158
CANBERRA ACT 2601
(02) 620 57181
bsss.enquiries@act.gov.au
http://www.bsss.act.edu.au

 Appendix A: Accreditation Panels that operated in 2010-2011

Appendix B: Institutions delivering courses certificated by the Board

BSSSS Chair Letter