This statement addresses the quality of the Class Size Audit dataset using the dimensions outlined in the NSW Department of Education's data quality management framework: institutional environment, relevance, timeliness, accuracy, coherence, interpretability and accessibility. It provides an overview of the dataset's quality and highlights any known data quality issues.
Institutional environment
In 2003 the NSW Government undertook to reduce government school class sizes in the early primary years to a state-wide average of:
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20 for Kindergarten students
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22 for Year 1 students, and
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24 for Year 2 students.
A class size audit is conducted for all primary classes each year.
The goals of the class size reduction program were achieved in 2007. Annual monitoring continues following support from principals and regional offices. Class size guidelines are set in the Staffing Agreement with the NSW Teachers Federation 2021 - 2024. Individual school data is also provided to principal networks for individual schools for preparation of their annual school reports.
To provide a robust indicator of class sizes in Australia, the Australian Government Department of Education asks all State and Territory Government school authorities to complete a questionnaire, as well as school peak organisations in the non-government sector. Using this information, the Department will calculate a national result to provide to the OECD.
Relevance
Content: Data is collected from all NSW Government primary, infant and central and community (primary grades only) schools from ERN (previously ebs: central). Schools for Specific Purposes (SSP), Distance Education Schools and Intensive English Centres (IEC) are not included. Support students who are enrolled in mainstream classes are counted as mainstream students and therefore contribute to the total class number.
Data items: enrolments; class name; class type – regular or composite; scholastic year.
Timeliness
The data is collected in March each year.
Data which has been checked and verified is requested by Office of the Secretary in June each year to be provided to OECD in August. Data requested is usually for the previous year
NSW summary data from this collection is also provided to the OECD for publication in Education at a Glance.
Accuracy
Response rates: All schools within scope provide returns, accuracy signed off by the school principal. Before collection date, the department.
Validation: Schools within scope use an online data verification and sign-off system to check and correct data harvested from ERN. The completed data is tested against a number of validation checks, including:
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Significant variation (>5 or < 5) in enrolments by grade against February enrolments
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Missing schools, invalid out-of-scope schools, invalid grades, mix of support and regular grades in a class, and duplicate grades within a class
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Abnormally small or large classes
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Schools that apply Team Teaching are requested to split those classes into equally sized classes with one teacher. IE, a class of 30 with 2 teachers will be entered as 2 classes of 15.
Coherence
Definition: The average class size for each grade is calculated by taking the average size of all classes that a child from that grade is in (including composite/multi-stage classes).
NSW data has been collected for over 10 years with the same definition. The process of online collection has been in place since 2007. Ease of online checking, data validation updates and schools’ awareness have progressively improved data quality. From 2016 some schools have commented that they had used RAM funding to reduce class sizes.
Interpretability
Data is able to be interpreted consistently for primary school classes (unlike secondary classes) as students generally remain with a single class group for learning activities.
Accessibility
Data is reported at State level through the Class Size fact sheet on the CESE website.