Writing became very important for academic life, especially in Australia, a country where many debates about writing report are going on. Since the 1980s, academic high school reports played an important part in communication between professors and parents.

However, even if it played an important part, as time goes on, there has been dissatisfaction with reports in high schools. First reports were known as a “plain language” reports. They are considered easy-to-follow formats of writing.

They are informing about student’s results and achievements in areas of spelling, grammar & punctuation, numeracy, writing, and reading. Parents, guardians or other members of the family can see a student’s average result and the minimum standard average for each level student is in; the level depends on student’s grades.

There is also the school average written in the report. Moreover, Australian high schools began using NAPLAN, testing for every student, with a goal to show individual student report on their results and areas where the student must improve.

Steps of writing report in Australian high schools

First and the most important step for writing report in Australian high schools is a purpose. Some reports are persuading, while others are supposed to inform about something. Before you start writing, you must have a strong and reasonable purpose behind your report. If the report is informative, then persuasive elements or own opinion are not supposed to be included. Next step is to create an outline. It will allow you to organize your information or statements better. If the source or supporting information is needed, then you have to prepare additional material.

An interesting fact is that after first ‘plain language’ reports, dissatisfaction grew very fast and, in 2006, Australian Federal Government came up with the idea of making reports more meaningful and important to students and their parents. A child’s performance in school subjects was graded using an A-E. It was something like a five-point scale.

High schools in Australia

Next to the ‘plain language’, there is a new method of reporting, called online report. High schools in Australia include reporting sites, like schoolreportwriter.com, where you can find the student’s name, the attitude of learning, progress, etc. There is also a weekly report, and not only their academic behaviour is included, but personal class behaviour as well as academic. In that way, parents will know how everything goes in school, without going or calling school or professor. Next, to Australia, UK, USA, South Africa & IB World Schools are using similar methods of reporting, which means that those types of reports make a huge benefit for future schooling.

Moving forward, something very interesting is created, and it is a “Report Robot”, with the purpose of producing report comments for every student. High technology obviously has an impact on everything, and the cost of a Report Robot is little more than $80,000 a year. You can find many useful videos and advice about how to write the report, and this YouTube link below is helping you to educate yourself and know more about online reports:

To sum up, report writing in Australian high schools is easier to write than any other formats, but it doesn’t mean that it is less important. It has a huge impact on education and future schooling.