chris and farideh

Can anyone shed some light on this op rating thing in qld schools. Can anyone give me some advice on which secondary schools have the best ratings (state and private) in the South Brisbane suburbs. Does anyone know of a league table that I can download?

Many thanks in advance

Chris

kt.2006

Hi Chris

From what I understand students in year 12 can either do vocational subjects or they take academic subjects so that they can get a good OP score for university entrance (not sure if this is totally right!)

The following links might help. The school league table was published in the Courier Mail.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/s...26-952,00.html

http://media01.couriermail.com.au/mu...7/04/op/op.htm

Kathy

snappy

Chris the OP or Overall Position is a rating system that is based on a Year 12 students results in Authority Subjects. They get ratings from their school work and exams and also from their QSC test (a basic core skills test any eligible student will sit)

The rating goes from 1 to 2 with 1 being the best.

There is a new system being put into place at the moment where a student that wants to get their Senior Certificate has been altered into a point scoring system to achieve a Queensland Certificate of Education or QCE at the end of year 12. Core subjects give you 4 points, then other vocational subjects can also bulk up your points to make up the overall 20 points required to achieve a QCE.

Don't confuse this to using a vocational subject to gain an OP rating. They do say some vocational subjects will give an OP rating but you are taking about the higher certificates that can be achieved and these generally only give an OP rating of around 14 (that is not going to get you into the best Uni's)

The other point to consider is that you can defer for a year and be considered a mature student where no OP rating is required. So for some students at our school this is an option for them where they are studying a school based apprenticeship. It still gives them an option to finish their apprenticeship full time after they leave school yet they can still apply for Uni at a later time. The apprenticeship would show they are willing to learn and can achieve success.

The OP tables in my opinion are useless as they show school results by gathering the results into certain groups i.e. OP ratings of 1 to 15, 1 is outstanding whereas 15 is very average so overall it tells you nothing about the school. By year 12 most students are there to try and achieve something either by doing a VET course or by sitting an OP. Some VET course are better than others so looking at the table it doesn't tell you a huge amount as to if the courses the students have achieved are of a higher standard, therefore useless information!

You are better off visiting the schools or asking if anyone can recommend a good school in a certain area on here.

You will also find that some years are better than others, last year students I was convinced would achieve an OP 1 rating came in with a OP 2 and everyone else seemed to get knocked back by one. These were students that had scholarships to some amazing universities throughout Australia.

So please don;t base decisions purely on tables as over here it just doesn't show the entire picture

sals

Hi snappy
you seem to have good knowledge of QLD school system. Wondered if you can offer me some advice please.
Moving to Townsville January 08. My son will turn 18 just as we leave. Should he go into year 12 at school and do his QCE or would he be better going to a TAFE and getting an apprenticeship or diploma or something. He is unsure what he wants to do career wise other than be a fire fighter (which is a tough profession to enter and requires life experince).
Thanks for any advice you can offer
sals

steve`o

http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/te/faqs/ops.html

snappy

Hi Sals to be a fire fighter they ask for the the successful completion of Year 12 or equivalent so it would depend on what your son has done at school and whether or not that could be accessed by the QSA as the equivalent to year 12, so use the link above to get onto the QSA site and see what you need to do to see if his qualifications are strong enough to be recognised as a year 12 qualification here in Oz.

It seems that most of the fire fighters by us are all the local bus drivers due to the driving license factor so maybe that is a good way to get into the fire fighter career.

I would say to stick with the fire fighter side of things if this is what he wants to do as it is worth while aiming for your dream job