Planning a Programme When the Cohort Is Split Three Ways
A school offers SACE Stage 2 Dutch to 22 students. Nine are heritage speakers who use Dutch at home; eight have completed Stage 1 Dutch at the school; five are new to the language and were admitted on the basis of a placement conversation. The school must submit school assessment for all 22 and enter them for the external examination. The head of department proposes teaching all 22 together with one task set, arguing that 'the rubric is the same for everyone'. A parent of one of the five beginners complains that her child cannot access the texts. The department has one teacher and 200 minutes of contact time per week.
1. Evaluate the head of department's proposal against the principles of assessment fairness and validity.
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The proposal confuses a common standard with a common task. It is correct that all candidates are judged against the same performance standards - that is what makes the subject comparable. It does not follow that all candidates should attempt identical tasks, because a task that is accessible to heritage speakers may be so far beyond the five beginners that it yields no usable evidence of their capability. A task nobody in a group can attempt produces invalid data, not fair data.
The parent's complaint is therefore substantively correct on access, though the remedy is not to lower the standard. The department can differentiate the input - shorter texts, glossaries, more structured scaffolds - while keeping the assessment criteria identical. What must be avoided is differentiated criteria, where beginners are marked against an easier rubric; that would make their results incomparable with the other 17 and with candidates at other schools.
The 200-minute constraint is real but not decisive: differentiation in text length and support costs preparation time, not contact time, and the heritage speakers can be given extension tasks that run in parallel.
2. The five beginners are unlikely to reach a high grade. Advise the department on whether they should be entered for Stage 2 at all, and what evidence should inform that decision.
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Entry decisions should be based on evidence of likely capability against the Stage 2 standards, gathered early enough to act on. The placement conversation is a starting point but is not sufficient evidence on its own, because it tests interaction rather than the reading, writing, and analytical demands of the assessment tasks. The department should run a short diagnostic in the first four weeks covering each assessment mode and compare the five students' performance with the Stage 1 exit standard.
If the diagnostic shows a student is two or more bands below the Stage 2 entry expectation, the defensible advice is to defer entry and build the missing foundation, rather than enter the student for a result that will not reflect their capability. This is not a judgement about the student's worth; it is a judgement about readiness for a specific standard, and it should be communicated with the evidence attached.
If a student chooses to proceed despite the advice, the department must still teach and assess them fairly, with access arrangements as needed - deferral is advice, not a gate. The decision, the evidence, and the student's response should be documented, and the conversation should happen before the census date for the subject so that a change of program remains possible.