When things go wrong inside Sydney’s most expensive schools

In the world of Sydney’s private schools, some principals refer to the HSC as a pressure cooker. Others compare students to race cars. And you don’t have to be a racing expert to know, even with the best fuel in the world, a Toyota Camry will never outpace a Ferrari.

“With a car, usually the more you spend, the better the performance of the car, but we are dealing with young people who are complex beings, not machines,” said one private school principal.

The HSC might not be a race, but among schools it is definitely a competition. Every year has winners and losers. Last year it was The Scots College in Bellevue Hill’s turn. The $55,000-a-year school tumbled from 40th to 80th spot in the Herald’s league table. A subsequent article in The Australian Financial Review highlighted the nexus between its high fees and declining position. It appeared to hit a nerve with its principal, Dr Ian Lambert, who sent multiple letters to parents.

He explained to parents how the rankings were calculated (it is a proportion of students scoring HSC marks above 90 per cent in each subject) with no distinction between the difficulty of the subjects. For example, 90 per cent in extension 2 mathematics is treated the same as 90 per cent in standard mathematics.

Principals the Herald spoke to for this story, many on the condition of anonymity, also criticised the narrow measure of success used to calculate league tables (the NSW government releases very limited information) while others said external accountability was a good opportunity to reflect and ensure the school was helping. Others said parent criticism could be uninformed and hurt teachers.

“On HSC results day, we have a breakfast and the heads of department are analysing their results,” says one private school principal. “Teachers get to share in the successes, which is really lovely. The thing that causes them the worry is the league table being released. The ranking is not particularly helpful; schools understand it and know its limitations but parents don’t.”

Another private school principal said there were many factors beyond a school’s control when it came to having a bad performance in the league tables.

“With HSC rankings, schools can fall into a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Parents hear a school performs well academically, so they enrol their academic child there, which ensures the school continues to perform well,” he said.

The principal said school boards could be particularly fond of relying on rankings as a performance measure.

“I think a lot of board members come from the world of numbers;