page_title: Education in Western Australia
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Education in Western Australia / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Winthrop Hall at sunset, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia.日本語: 西オーストラリア大学のウィンスロップホールРусский: Университет Западной Австралии. Уинтроп Холл.中文: 歷史悠久聞名的UWA
context_page_description: Education in Western Australia consists of public and private schools in the state of Western Australia, including public and private universities and TAFE colleges. Public school education is supervised by the Department of Education, which forms part of the Government of Western Australia. The School Curriculum and Standards Authority is an independent statutory authority responsible for developing a curriculum and associated standards in all schools, and for ensuring standards of student achievement, and for the assessment and certification according to those standards.
  Western Australia follows a three-tier system, consisting of primary education, followed by secondary education and tertiary education.
  Education is compulsory in Western Australia between the ages of six and seventeen. From 1 January 2008 persons in their 17th year must be in school, training, or have a job until the end of that year.
context_section_description: The first schools started to appear during the 1830s throughout the state, in the form of one-teacher schools. The oldest government-sponsored education institution in Western Australia, Guildford Colonial School (now Guildford Primary School), was founded at the Swan River Colony in 1833, and consisted of several premises in the townsite before a purpose built school was constructed in 1870. From the 1850s schools became more common around Western Australia, with many of the teachers being sourced from educated convicts who had obtained their ticket of leave. Initially there were no official qualifications required to teach, only that a teacher be literate, and many schools were run by nuns or single women.
  The first school in the state with a focus on educating Indigenous children, Annesfield, was opened in 1852 by clergyman John Wollaston and Anne Camfield in Albany.
  A royal commission in September 1910 proposed that a university be established in Western Australia. Following this recommendation, the establishment of the University of Western Australia in 1911 by an act of the Parliament of Western Australia meant students could begin receiving tertiary qualifications in the state. UWA opened to students two years later.
  In 1915 James Miles chose Toodyay school to be the pioneer of his Special Rural Schools programme. To this end he worked with the headmaster Roderick Brooke Cowden and his staff to design the equipment needed to enable the students to be more independent and resourceful in the learning process. Subjects were to be based on the practical activities of farming life. School gardens were established where the children experimented with different types of grains such a wheat, oats and barley, and the growing of vegetables and flowers. Girls were taught fruit and vegetable preservation, and first aid. When teaching standard curriculum subjects such as arithmetic and history, teachers were encouraged to use local sources, for example "figures showing the district's imports and exports were computed from the railway records". By 1920 twelve other special rural schools were established in the state. This number would peak at 40 in 1922. This success was in no small part due to the government's recognition of the state's dependence on agriculture. The commissioners of the Royal Commission into Education 1921 visited Toodyay and were highly impressed with its programme.
  Students in Year 11 and 12 initially undertook a Tertiary Admittance Exam for each subject, and a score was established based almost entirely on the results of a single exam from each of six subjects over the two years. From 1989 the Tertiary Entrance Exam (TEE) was the standard academic examination for students completing their twelfth year of schooling, which was used to determine a student's Tertiary Entrance Rank (TER). In 2010 it was renamed to produce an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR), a move towards a more national approach to students eligibility for tertiary study. Students satisfactorily completing Year 12 secondary education receive a West Australian Certificate of Education (WACE).
caption: Winthrop Hall, a prominent landmark on the main UWA campus.
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