What really works in raising students’ academic results

Teachers have long described year 9 as the “lost year”, a time when students’ engagement in school can slip and when motivation falls.

Ashfield Boys High principal Dwayne Hopwood describes it as the middle of high school “dip”, a phenomenon he believes can be tackled by building a “culture of high expectations”, setting up a predictable classroom structure and banning smartphones during the school day.

“We also deliberately don’t use a two-week timetable. To take that extra cognitive load off students, we keep it to a weekly version,” he says.

“A few years ago, we started giving every student a success planner, a diary for each term with their timetable, test dates and lesson notes. It’s about having high expectations of students from the first day of year 7, and giving them a road map for success at school.”

An updated report, released on Monday from NSW’s Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation titled What Works Best, outlines eight of the most effective classroom practices to lift students’ outcomes, results and engagement in class.

The NSW Education Department study highlights strategies “almost always present in our high-performing schools”. These include high expectations, explicit teaching, effective feedback, use of data, assessment, classroom management, wellbeing and collaboration.

The study also contains a tranche of new data from the department’s Tell Them From Me surveys, which ran from 2013 to 2024.

Surveys of more than 320,000 NSW public school students collected last year reveal 74 per cent of year 9 students said their teachers had high expectations of them, compared with 84 per cent in year 7 and about 93 per cent of primary-aged children.

The report says effective classroom management is connected with students’ academic achievement but less than half of the state’s public school students in years 8, 9 and 10 say they are learning in a positive classroom climate.

About 42 per cent of year 8 and 9 students report learning in a positive classroom environment.

Preliminary data from this year’s NSW Public School Survey reveals 65 per cent of high school students say they are engaged at school, and just 58 per cent report being motivated.

“Effective classroom management is important for creating a positive classroom environment that minimises disruptions, maximises instruction time, supports teacher and student relationships and safety,” the report said.

Students who report higher levels of classroom management are five times as likely to be classified as a “flourishing” student, the study says.

The study also highlights how explicit teaching, which involves step-by-step instructions and checking for understanding, puts students up to four months ahead in their learning.

Since implementing explicit teaching in all classes five years ago, Doonside High has reported more students moving from a band 4 to 5 in the HSC.

“We’ve embedded explicit teaching in all faculties. When students walk into any classroom, they immediately see what they will be learning up on the board,” principal Colin Campbell says.

“It has led to students being more engaged, classes being more settled. Students like that predictability.”

Ashfield Boys and Doonside High have reported among the greatest gains in HSC average scores since 2019, and both were identified by the department as being among the biggest improvers.

At Ashfield Boys, Hopwood said the school was among the earliest adopters of smartphone bans (they are kept in a central locker) and has limited laptop use in school hours.

“From a practical and cognitive sense, kids need structure within the school day. So if you remove all the extraneous distractions it frees up their brain to concentrate on their learning,” says Hopwood.

“By keeping laptops at school, and not having ‘bring your own device’ policies, the adults are controlling the technology, not the kids.”

Hopwood, who also teaches a year 9 English class, says establishing strong teacher and student “relationships from the very beginning can sustain you through that dip that you see in year 9 and 10”.

The report also includes data on the importance of effective feedback for students: 54 per cent of high school students reported receiving helpful feedback, compared with 79 of primary school students.

It also highlights the importance of wellbeing as one of the eight strategies to improve student outcomes. Surveys show about half of year 8 and 9 students don’t feel they belong at school. Two-thirds of year 11 and 12 students reported a positive sense of belonging.

In 2022, 68 per cent of NSW public school students said they felt like they belonged at school, below the OECD average of 75 per cent.

“Research shows students’ positive wellbeing at school is linked to greater academic achievement, strong primary to secondary transitions, completing year 12, lower absenteeism and positive social behaviours,” the report says.

The study shows collaboration between teachers, both within and across schools, as an important feature of many high-performing schooling systems. Some schools in NSW are working together to improve outcomes across networks of schools, including in the Central Coast.

The Tell Them From Me surveys, which collected data from hundreds of thousands of students over 11 years, have been replaced with the NSW Public School Survey. The report was published as part of Public Education Week.

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