In doing so,the NSW government has doubled down on a policy that it should have wound back. Meanwhile,it downgraded a plan to identify gifted and talented students in all schools that would have been a genuine step forward.
Premier Dominic Perrottet said the primary school and selective high school would be at the Westmead Health and Innovation District,adding “I see[the schools] as a training ground in our West for our future Nobel Prize winners in medicine and science”.
A smattering of selective schools is a good thing. Exceptionally bright kids,the top few per cent,can get lost in a mainstream school. Many students at the most academically successful school in NSW,the selective James Ruse Agricultural High,already go on to study medicine.
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But in presiding over a system of almost 50 selective schools – some of them set up with the explicit intent of keeping middle-class families in the public system – successive NSW governments have created a “premium” public option. As one report put it,selective schools are the “absolute education prize”.
In doing so,they have undermined the rest of the state system. Many mainstream state schools are now “residualised”,which means they are the option of last resort,avoided by families with the income to pay for a private school or for selective school coaching.
It becomes a vicious cycle;as the concentration of disadvantage at a school grows,aspirational parents become even less likely to send their children there,and more intent on scrimping and saving for a premium option. Research has shown that when a new selective stream opens,results and enrolments at other public schools fall.