The recently-launched ?MySchool? website has highlighted the fact that a large percentage of students in this country only reach minimum standards of literacy and numeracy. Dr Jensen argues that while measures of school performance are vital to improvement, these measures need to focus on student progress rather than performance at a single point in time. The use of value-added measures is able to achieve this. They consistently measure school performance more accurately because they are better able to isolate the performance of schools from other factors that affect student performance. This is to ensure that schools and teachers can focus on improving all students ? particularly those most in need. It also creates a fairer system that is not biased against schools serving more disadvantaged communities.

Ben Jensen is the Director of the School Education Program of the Grattan Institute. Before joining Grattan, Ben worked at the OECD on a number of policy areas, and authored two key reports on the theme of this presentation: Creating Effective Teaching and Learning Environments: First Results from TALIS and Measuring improvements in learning outcomes ? best practices to assess the value-added of schools. He was also responsible for an international network examining issues of the learning environment and organisation of schools that focused on issues such as teacher salaries and working hours and conditions, instruction hours within schools, and class size. Prior to joining the OECD, Ben was a Senior Analyst at the Department of Premier and Cabinet at the Victorian Government, Australia and a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research where he led the education research programme. Ben has a PhD in Economics from the University of Melbourne.