Dear Year 12 Class of 2020: don’t sweat the ATAR

Dear Year 12 Students around Australia, 

This year has been absolutely extraordinary for you (well, for all of us, but particularly for you).  Year 12 is a life milestone that often includes our legal coming of age, and always includes the end of our school days. For many of us, that’s the end of 13 years of school routine, friendships, close associations with teachers and sports coaches, and the routines of childhood. At 17 or 18, those 13 years are nearly all of your life, and it is often suggested that they define the life you will come to lead. 

In some respects, this is true, but in some important ways, it’s not. Probably the most important way it’s not, is in what we attach to the ATAR. Through much of year 11 and 12, there can be tremendous focus on what this number means in terms of how it will shape and define your life: whether at school, or amongst well-meaning friends and family, those of you in year 12 will be bombarded by questions about what you want to do after school, and often, what ATAR do you need, to do it.   

What you really, truly, deeply need to understand is: ATAR’s don’t define you, and they don’t define your life. They measure a point in time that nobody cares about within a couple of weeks of them being delivered. If University is the pathway you want to take, then the ATAR is one ticket to that dance, but it’s not the only ticket. There are pathways based on other criteria such as your other lived experiences, and other study and learning that you may elect to do. Many of those other alternative pathways are more accessible, less stressful, and lead to much richer and joyful learning and living. 

Your pathway through life is not defined by your ATAR. No potential employer is going to ask you what it was (or wasn’t); no-one is ever going to invite you out because of what it was (or wasn’t); no-one is going to love you because of what it was (or wasn’t). A good ATAR does not automatically make for a better life, and neither does an ATAR that doesn’t meet your expectations make for a worse one.

It is my job to work with Universities around Australia in supporting them to be the best providers of Education that they can be. In this capacity, I consistently hear how those institutions are focused on delivering the very best learning experiences that they can, to all their students. I hear that they are wanting to take students from right around Australia, and the world, who are keen to learn what they have to teach. Their number one priority is being attractive to students as places to learn, and this will continue for some years. 

If attending University is what you want to do, then in fact you are awash with options, most of which have little to with an ATAR. A friend of mine in the sector recently observed: “An ATAR is not a pair of concrete boots”. It doesn’t set you in place. It doesn’t set your path. That’s what you do.   

And there’s never been a better time to be thinking about what learning options you may want to consider from here. Right now, the whole VET sector is under reform, and being reconfigured to help you get better skills that better connect to jobs. Right now, the universities you may want to attend are completely rethinking how they teach, so that you can get the very best teaching and learning based on both the potential of digital, and the very real benefits of spending time on campus, interrogating great minds and making great friends. Right now, the whole post-secondary system is being reconsidered, so that merging and mingling work, university, TAFE learning and microcredentials can give you exactly the skills and experiences you want, to be able to step confidently into the world of work that’s rapidly emerging, and that you will be part of.

Right now, you are also living through one of the great defining moments in our history. You have had a year devoid of the usual markers and milestones of year 12. It’s a year that will be remembered as bleak, hard, and “unfun”. No socials, formals or valedictory speeches or pretty frocks or sharp suits. And what are you doing? You’re getting on with it. You’re being, and becoming, resilient. You are flexing, adapting, and evolving how you live and learn as you’ve never had to before. And you know what? When you ask any employer (including the firm I work for) “What are the top qualities of the best teams?”, then its resilience, creativity and adaptability that come top of the list, every single time. Not ATARs.

So please, take heart in knowing that all you can do is the best you can do, and that will be enough. And then, like the rest of us, come 31 December you can slam the door on the hellishness of 2020, and bravely get on with the rest of your life.

The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organisation or its member firms.