The following guidelines have been developed to assist schools to meet the requirements of the Annual Reporting Policy 
57k for all Queensland Schools.
The specific information that all Queensland schools (state and non-state) are to report in a School Annual Report for publication on their school website is outlined in the Annual Reporting Policy for all Queensland Schools 57k (Policy). The policy is set out as a checklist to provide an easy to use guide for schools.
To maintain consistency of reporting across state, Catholic and independent schools, definitions have been agreed by the heads of the three schooling sectors (state, Catholic and independent schools) in relation to measures of student attendance, apparent retention, qualifications and professional development of teachers, staff attendance and teacher retention.
The School Annual Report information for the previous program year is to be made publicly available on the internet, and schools are to make arrangements to provide the information, on request, to a parent, carer or a person who is responsible for a student at the school and is unable to access the internet.
The School Annual Report is to be published by 30 June of each year. Following the release of Next Step, post school destinations information for Year 12 completers is to be included by 30 September of each year.
Schools may use their own format to publish this information and state schools are required to publish all the information requirements contained in the state school reporting template 2.3M. For state schools, school principals will be emailed this template pre-populated with all the quantitative data requirements. Furthermore, the Policy represents the minimum information schools are required to publish and schools may add any additional material. However, the report is not intended to be a lengthy document and it is expected that, for most schools, the document would be approximately five to seven pages.
The following guidelines are provided to assist principals and school governing bodies when reporting student achievement and school performance data. These examples should be considered in conjunction with the privacy and data interpretation issues addressed in Section 2 of these guidelines.
Schools mirror the communities they serve and it is essential that the information reported contributes to a greater understanding of the context in which the school operates.
Schools are encouraged to provide a broad range of information to parents and the community. Any education sector specific terminology should be fully explained and the use of jargon is not recommended.
The school context describes the environment in which the school operates, or is likely to operate in the foreseeable future. It is important that all published data can be interpreted by an audience that has been provided with a working knowledge of the school context.
As part of the new Commonwealth reporting requirements schools are to report on the characteristic of the student body. Other than the breakdown of enrolment by gender, as published on the school 's My School website, schools may consider the publication of student enrolment continuity rates from February to November for the schools.
In addition to the contextual information outlined in the Policy schools may also consider including information about the following:
This section describes information about the qualifications, workforce composition and professional development of teachers employed at your school. Important information about staff attendance and retention is also included.
Information for the 2009 program year on teaching staff numbers and full-time equivalent teaching staff numbers were supplied to the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) for publication on My School 
.
State schools will report on the composition of the workforce as teaching and non-teaching staff using headcount and full-time equivalent derived from the Minimum Obligatory Human Resource Information (MOHRI). This will ensure consistency with the information provided to the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority. The information for state schools is provided by the Human Resources Branch of Department of Education and Training will be average MOHRI counts for the previous year of teaching and non teaching staff, with headcount and FTE of staff who have identified as Indigenous.
For those schools whose Indigenous staff numbers are either zero or a very small in number (e.g. fewer than 4 FTE), it is recommended that the statement "a small number of staff have identified as indigenous " or zero is used.
Schools will report on the qualifications of classroom teachers and school leaders employed at the school, based on those staff employed at the end of Term 4 each year. Staff qualifications should be recorded at the highest level of attainment, and reported as the percentage of the school workforce in each of the following categories:
Additional reporting (e.g. names and qualifications of individual teachers or staff) is at the school 's discretion.
In this section schools should report on three elements:
(i) The total funds expended on teacher professional development. To prevent duplication of reporting for schools, this figure should be based on items directly associated with enabling participation in professional development as outlined in the Australian Government Quality Teacher Program (AGQTP) (see below).
For Catholic and independent schools this figure will be the same figure reported in the Australian Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) Financial Questionnaire (FQ). Education Queensland schools will report the figure obtained from School Management System (SMS).
As with the Australian Government 's Quality Teacher Program (AGQTP) reporting requirements, only expenditure directly associated with enabling participation in a professional development activity, as defined above, may be included in the report. Expenses included in the reported figure of expenditure may include:
(ii) The major professional development initiatives should be described. Details regarding in-kind professional development activities undertaken (e.g. mentoring or peer learning circles) can also be included.
(iii) For state schools the School Planning, Reporting and Reviewing performance measures - the percentage (or proportion) of the teaching staff involved in professional development, should also be reported in this section of the report.
This percentage will not include unplanned sick leave or emergency leave of more than five days, work-cover related absence, long service leave or planned family leave. The calculations will only include details for permanent and temporary classroom teachers and school leaders.
This figure will report the proportion or percentage of staff that was retained by the school for the entire year (i.e. for 2009) from the end of the previous school year (i.e. 2008). For state schools, the retention rate is calculated as a percentage by dividing the total number of teachers retained (FTE) by the total establishment (FTE) for the school.
Retained staff will include those staff members who have taken sabbatical leave, leave without pay, long service leave and those who have not substantively separated from the school. Those who have resigned, retired or transferred to another location during the school year (including transfers at level or through promotion) are not included in the group reported as retained teaching staff.
It is important that schools report their outcomes in relation to the Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 NAPLAN test results, Year 12 outcomes information and retention rates. However, it is equally important that schools provide contextual information in relation to these results. There may be many factors affecting these outcomes and schools should take this opportunity to provide a concise comment of individual school interests and strengths.
Average student attendance rates to be calculated by identifying the number of full school days attended by all enrolled students divided by the number of school days able to be attended by all enrolled students. Results will be reported as a percentage. The period should be Semester 1 (if calculated by the schooling system) or the last 20 days of May each year (if calculated by an individual school).
In this section describe the procedures your school takes when the attendance requirements of the compulsory schooling or compulsory participation phase are not met by a student, for part of a day or for longer periods. Include a description of how your school implements roll marking processes, including when rolls are marked and how your school follows-up absences with parents.
School measures to be reported in the areas of reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy tests for Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are defined in the Policy.
For state schools it is required the Annual Report also include results for the performance measure, percentage of students in the upper two bands, of the School Planning, Reporting and Reviewing Framework for both 2008 and 2009.
Apparent retention rates from Year 10 to Year 12 are to be reported.
The ten outcomes listed in the policy are to be reported.
In addition, state school are required to report the proportion of student in the Overall Positions bands 1 5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20, and 21-25. Also, state schools will report the number of students awarded a Certificate II or above and the number of students receiving a Certificate I, Certificate II and Certificate III or above.
Schools are encouraged to use existing data for the recent school opinion surveys on staff, parent and student satisfaction with the school when reporting on this aspect of the report.
For state schools, broadly reporting, in plain language on the overall measures and the specific dimensions of the staff, parent and student surveys for the program year must be considered. Also, state schools can comment on the 2009 result for the key measures of the School Planning, Reporting and Reviewing framework, namely:
For schools that had graduating Year 12 students in the previous year, information of the post-school destinations of school leavers is required. This data will be based on the post-school destination information from the current Next Step survey. Information will include background information on how the Next Step survey was conducted, the school response rate to the survey, definitions of main destinations, a summary of findings in relation to main destinations of students and a chart showing main destinations of students.
Please refer to the Next Step web page for further information.
The following information is provided to manage privacy considerations for the publication of student achievement and school performance data.
The fundamental principle for reporting performance information is to support school improvement throughout Queensland and to provide a profile of all schools to the community. While the reporting initiative is a valuable move towards sharing education information, it brings with it responsibilities in the areas of personal information and privacy. The reporting of student achievement information needs to be managed according to appropriate privacy provisions and needs to ensure that publicly available information is accurate and easily interpreted.
There are many Queensland schools that have small enrolment numbers, particularly at individual year levels. For this reason, care needs to be taken not to identify individual students. Care also needs to be taken in the interpretation of information where trends may be volatile. When reporting on small numbers or 'cohorts' of students, an annual variation in enrolment of just one or two students can have a significant effect on data from one year to the next. This is where setting information in context is of prime importance (see also Section 1 of these guidelines).
It is possible to identify individual students both directly and indirectly. Direct disclosure occurs when information about an individual is simply published outright. Indirect disclosure results when individual information can be deduced from small subsets of data either published or not published. This can occur where data are reported for all students in a group, as well as for a large subset of this group leaving only a small subset not reported.
When publishing information on student achievement and school performance:
All published information must:
School principals may decide that it is not possible to report certain data publicly in ways that maintain student privacy or minimise misinterpretation of performance. Where a decision is made not to report specific data for these reasons, a narrative or descriptive comment on student achievement or school performance would meet the requirements of the Schools Reporting checklist.
Before performance information is published it should be reviewed in order to decide how it could be best reported, taking into account factors such as:
The following information is provided to assist secondary school principals to report on retention of students to Year 12.
The completion of Year 12 is recognised as a significant factor in ensuring that all young persons are best placed to enjoy success in their future work and life. To ensure that young Queenslanders have the best possible chances of completing Year 12 or equivalent, substantial legislation changes relating to the Senior Phase of schooling took effect from 2006 under Education and Training Reforms for the Future (ETRF).
One of the nationally accepted measures of the completion of Year 12 is the Year 10 to Year 12 apparent retention rate.
The Year 10 to Year 12 apparent retention rate is defined as the number of full-time students in Year 12 in any given year expressed as the percentage of those students who were at the same secondary school three years previously. This is the information specifically provided by the Department of Education and Training.
Comparative information on apparent retention at a national and state level is available through the Australian Bureau of Statistics' publication Schools Australia (Cat. No. 4221.0).
There are a number of considerations required when providing any analysis of apparent retention rate trends particularly at the school level. Apparent retention rates take no account of a range of factors that may be important characteristics of a particular school, such as:
The inclusion of repeating and mature-age students and intra/interstate movements into schools can result in apparent retention rates beyond 100 percent while in small schools, relatively slight changes in enrolment result in large changes in apparent retention rates.
This page was last reviewed on 12 May 2011 at 01:31PM
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© The State of Queensland (Department of Education, Training and Employment) 2010.