The aim of the Australian education system is to provide ‘a system that supports participation and helps all Australians reach their potential and actively contribute to our communities’. It also seeks to provide the opportunity for ‘the child of every class, to become great and useful in the destinies of this country’, portrayed through comparable aspirations. It would be difficult to assign one quote to page 1 of the Department of Education’s 2022-23 Corporate Plan and the other to William Charles Wentworth’s proposal for the first university in Australia. These quotes manifest the stark reality that the education system in Australia is slow to adapt to the changing needs of society. The Department of Education claims that the opportunities their system provides is central to what students achieve and yet it has failed to provide what I believe is true equal opportunity through the outdated nature of the system.

Naturally, the grades of a student in Australia at all ages are crucial to their opportunity to progress further in the education system. The lowest-performing students in high schools don’t have access to ATAR studies which even then only the highest-scoring ATAR students have access to a university education studying the course that they would like. To study a postgraduate education at university you need to be achieving higher scores than many of your fellow students. A university degree has become a common requirement for many jobs and positions in society, with year 12 grades an absolute minimum. The further a student is able to travel along the education system, the greater access to and chance of getting better jobs. The education system claims to put the smartest and therefore most appropriate people into the most skilled jobs, jobs which in turn earn the most occupational reward as a reflection of their higher level of intelligence and education. This is shown by the fact that to achieve the most skilled and highest-paying jobs, you need to progress further than many other people along the education system.

However, it does not appear that, in practice, the education system worldwide is putting the most skilled and appropriate people in the most lucrative occupational positions in society. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple (a company whose success is incontestable), claimed in 2019 that over half of his workforce did not have a college degree. You are also able to read many stories of college dropouts going on to become huge successes. Many companies will hire dropouts from some of the most prestigious universities in the world because the value is in the acceptance letter and not the actual degree. Universities such as Harvard and Yale only accept the brightest students in the world. Employers know they are getting the smartest young minds and, as Tim Cook says, the years spent at university could be spent shaping these obviously capable students into top employees instead of learning a lot of information at university which he claims is by a large part irrelevant to the actual roles of the job. We can claim that the education system is not putting the most skilled and most appropriate people into the best jobs in society because it is a fact that your intelligence does not equal your occupational reward. If you were to take 100 people of 100 IQ, they would all be earning different occupational rewards. The system cannot claim that the most intelligent students are the ones able to progress further and therefore achieve the incentive of the better-paid jobs because the grading systems of modern education simply do not rely on intelligence.

The façade of the education system is present in the league table system used to rank schools on their performance. The position of a school on the table is determined by the grades of its pupils with the ‘better’ performing schools at the top of table. The league tables are not a true reflection of the performance of a school. For example, the table could compare school Y and school Z, with school Y producing mostly grade A students and boasting a lucrative position at the top of the table, and school Z sitting in a modest position on the table as this school on average produces grade C students. The league table would suggest that school Y far outperforms school Z based on their student’s grades. However, the tables fail to mention any context. If we were to say that school Y only accepts students who are already at a grade A level and school Z accepts students of a grade E or grade D level, we could argue that in reality school Z is a better-performing school as it shows the greater actual improvement amongst performance of students.

The same logic can be applied to all areas of Australian schooling. University students are denied postgraduate study if their grades aren’t high enough in a condition the universities impose to make sure only the most intelligent students can progress the furthest. However, your grade point average and unit scores which determine your ability to progress further are not an accurate representation of your ability or your intelligence. The Australian education system needs to move on from its heavily quantifiable way of ranking students. A non-working student living with their parents scoring an average of 75 per cent will be considered more favourably for opportunity than a student living alone working full-time hours to survive who is scoring 72 per cent. This is a backwards way of thinking as modern living has changed many factors such as an increased number of international students as well as driven up costs of living. Many students do not have the ability to perform their studies as well as other students so why are we offering opportunity on the sole basis of a student’s ability to perform their studies? Obviously, we do not want people in university who won’t put in the effort and low scores can be reflective of this, but it is not always the case. The pandemic moved most study online and some students wouldn’t have had consistent access to computer facilities to make the most out of their studies, through no fault of their own. We need an education system that takes more into account of the situation of the individual student as opposed to just seeing them as a number and denying opportunity on the very basis of that number. It seems ironic that the opportunities that the education system aim to provide at ‘the very centre of what they do’ are restricted by the very same workings of that system.

Across all ages students are instinctively judged on their grades. We are judging people on their ability to perform as opposed to their intelligence which is what the education system claims. The capability to progress further in based solely on these test scores and numbers. We need more modern thinking and consideration to the individual situation of students as opposed to a system that is simply rewarded students who are in the most privileged positions of access to study.