Last Tuesday saw Haileybury Senior School host two Honours Assemblies to acknowledge the outstanding achievements of students in last Year’s VCE.
The remarkable cohort of high achieving graduates from last year returned to be acknowledged by their peers and by Senior School students in Years 9 to 12.
A highlight was the acknowledgment for the five Haileybury students who achieved the highest possible Australian Tertiary Admission Ranking of 99.95.
12% of all Haileybury graduates, 62 students, achieved an ATAR of 99 — placing them in the top 1% in the country, 50% (258 students) achieved an ATAR of 90 or above placing them in the top 10% and an outstanding 94% were placed in the top 40% in the country.
There was also a wonderful acknowledgement for the strong performance of the 2025 Year 11 students (now in Year 12) in their VCE subjects. Remarkably, 20 students in Year 11 achieved a perfect study score of 50 last year out of 46 perfect study scores overall.
The VCE outcomes are the result of the strong teaching program across all year levels and build on the exceptional national testing performance (NAPLAN) of students at Years 3, 5, 7 and 9.
Students in the four year levels in 2026 are heading into the NAPLAN testing program from Wednesday, 11 March.
NAPLAN has been an important part of the Australian education landscape since 2008 and the tests cover reading comprehension, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and mathematics.
The results provide families with a point in time assessment of a student’s achievement against the relevant national curriculum level. In 2022 the testing program went fully online (apart from Year 3 writing) and schools now receive the results for all categories, except writing, in early Term 2. Haileybury has always used NAPLAN data as an important component of our school improvement planning. We will once again expect Haileybury collective results to be amongst the very best in the country and will do a detailed diagnostic of the data to identify areas for further improvement.
The individual student data reports will be released to families early in Term 3 once the assessment of writing has been completed (writing is still assessed by human markers) and the state and national results have been verified.*
*Principal Scott was appointed by Australia’s nine education ministers to be the Chairman of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) in December 2021. He was reappointed for a second three-year term in 2024. ACARA has responsibility for NAPLAN, the Australian Curriculum and the MySchool website.
Principal Scott has also just been re-appointed by Minister Jason Clare to another three-year term as an Expert Member of the Council for International Education. In his letter of re-appointment, Minister Clare noted, “This is a reflection of your professional experience, sector knowledge and the valuable contribution you have made to the Council’s ongoing work …”.
Derek Scott
CEO | Principal
