A PLAN to scrap the OP system from Queensland’s schools has been welcomed by the south-west branch president of the Queensland Teachers Union.

Christopher Smith said he believed the OP concept, which adjusts students’ ranking and performance on the Core Skills test against how their classmates faired both in their school and across the state, disadvantaged schools with a smaller amount of pupils.

Education Minister Kate Jones made the announcement earlier this week, with students from 2019 to receive an ATAR instead of an OP rank – something welcomed by Mr Smith.

“We’d prefer [students] to have an opportunity for them to fully demonstrate their ability, rather than being affected by the stress of testing,” he said.

“Personally, from my experience in a small regional school, students are disadvantaged by the fact there are less numbers in their cohort and that has to do with how OPs are done.

“That means less students are getting a higher OP in rural towns.

“I think they are trying to move away from school grouping scaling that currently exists. It will be more based on individual student performance.”

The new system will feature three pieces of internal assessment and one piece of external assessment, which will be marked by the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority.

This is good news for rural kids according to Mr Smith.

“The current system advantages students with high numbers of students,” he said.

“There are kids going through getting better results than I had [when I was at school] but are suffering because they are at a small school.

“Ultimately, the OP is only relevant if you’re going into university in your first and second year.

“The OP’s importance has been lessened but at the same time the stress around getting it has increased.”

Mr Smith said the only concern the QTU had was over the assessment structure for maths and science.

“They want to make 50% of the students rank to come from one external assessment and that puts extra pressure on the students to not mess up,” he said.