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At Crestwood High in Sydney’s north-west, the start of the school year begins with the top student from the previous year addressing the next crop of HSC graduates.
“When the dux comes back and talks honestly about how they studied, managed their time and balanced their lives, it’s very authentic,” says principal Tania Wright.
If it’s meant to motivate them, it appears to be working.
A Herald analysis of Higher School Certificate results using the metric of the average scores in each subject reveals Crestwood High is among the most-improved schools of recent years. On the annual HSC results rankings based on band 6s, released in December, the school placed 23rd among public non-selective schools, but on average scores across the full cohort it makes the top 10.
Crestwood has lifted its average HSC score across subjects to 80 last year, outperforming its average score over the past three years.
Last year music 1 was the school’s top subject, followed by English advanced, with students recording an average score in each subject above 85.
It was followed by visual arts, mathematics advanced and investigating science.
The dux of the school is not the only one doing a presentation on success. Staff address other teachers in their faculties if the NSW Education Standards Authority results analysis shows they have excelled in a certain topic.
“Teachers who have achieved success, in terms of their HSC results within their subject, present to the rest of the staff about the particular aspects of teaching that they deliver, what their focus is on, and how they’ve been able to get the best out of the students,” Wright said.
She said teacher expertise is also critical to results. There has been a concerted effort to shift students performing at a band 5 (a mark between 80 and 89), so the teachers workshopped what to do to push students up to band 6, and also band 4 into band 5.
“We backward map from year 12 back into year 7. So, incrementally from year 7, each aspect of their writing becomes more and more sophisticated with their particular year groups.”
Lake Macquarie High, south of Newcastle, recorded a 10 percentage point increase to its average score between 2023 and 2025. The school has also been recognised by the Department of Education as one of the state’s most-improved schools.
Principal Brendan Maher began leading the school more than a decade ago.
“When I got there I had the difficulty of facing having the school closed because it was so underperforming and losing students so quickly,” he said.
His first job was building connections in a bid to lift his school’s enrolments. The staff were talented teachers, he said, but benefited from professional learning.
“I spent a motza on professional learning, to build staff confidence to learn and try new things,” he said.
Maher himself became a teacher after being made redundant when the BHP steelworks in Newcastle closed in September 1999.
Speaking as their school marked public education week, he said having staff work to mark HSC exams also boosted results.
“I have a very highly committed executive team and staff, a lot of staff are encouraged to do HSC marking, which is the best level of professional development.”
The school is a gifted and talented partner school, and recent upgrades to help teach the curriculum include a marine ecology lab, indoor gym, recording studio and commercial kitchen upgrade.
“Our focus isn’t on the band 6 results, it is the students who don’t think they can get the HSC, and they walk away with band 2s and 3s.”
But HSC results might be helping to lift enrolments, which have jumped from just under 250 students to more than 500 students next year.
This analysis of HSC data uses precise average subject marks, contained in public high schools’ annual reports, across all subjects, released in July.
This analysis stands in contrast to the Herald’s end-of-year HSC league tables, which use limited performance data provided by the NSW Education Standards Authority.
Other schools that had big improvement in average scores between 2023 and last year include Monaro High School, Casino High School and Kurri Kurri High School.
An analysis of public schools released last year found top-performing schools “almost always” focused on high expectations, explicit teaching, effective feedback, using data to inform practice, assessment, classroom management, wellbeing and collaboration.
Dr Jennifer Buckingham, the NSW Department of Education’s executive director of the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation, said in the HSC a school’s strong learning culture often played a part.
“It is not being competitive; they share resources, they’re a crew, students are sharing their knowledge with each other and seeing it as a group effort,” she said.
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