’Don’t do it for me, do it for yourself

My eldest daughter sits her HSC from October 13, so this is very much my first rodeo. Bear with me.

She’s at a public high school, and over 13 years of having my kids in classrooms I’ve done the full tour: Catholic primary, a private girls’ school, a private boys’ school, and now the public system.

But there’s one thing I’ve watched all of them fumble in the same way, and it has nothing to do with fees or facilities. It’s what we tell average kids about the HSC, and more broadly about schooling in general.

If your child wants medicine or law or astrophysics, there’s no denying the number they get on December 16 matters. That’s not who I’m writing about.

I’m writing about everyone else. The great middle, the kids sitting somewhere between the 15th and the 90th percentile, which is to say almost all of them. The ones who were never in the running for a 99 ATAR, and who have worked out that the adults around them have quietly stopped expecting much, under the guise of “it’s too much pressure”.

We tell those kids the HSC doesn’t matter. It’s just a mark. There are a million pathways. And I don’t disagree. The HSC is not the be-all and end-all.

Nor is school the only place a person gets to find out who they are. Kids prove themselves on sporting fields and in music rooms. They prove themselves in first jobs, in trades, in businesses they start at 23 with no idea what they’re doing. They travel, they make things, they show up for people, they give back. There are, genuinely, a million ways forward from here.

So let me say the thing we’ve all been dancing around. Telling them it doesn’t matter is counterproductive. It does matter. Effort matters.

Because otherwise every hard thing that comes at them for the rest of their life becomes another chance to opt out. Another opportunity to find a reason it doesn’t really count, and to face it half-heartedly. That’s a habit, and habits set.

If the HSC didn’t matter what was the point of any of this? What was the point of the past 13 years of schooling?

Because here’s what I’ve come to believe, and you can call me idealistic: the HSC is not a measurement. It’s a mirror.

Consider the student who has always been a 50 per cent kid. If that kid genuinely applies themselves for the first time in their life, they might get 70.

The goal of the 70 is not to unlock a particular degree, and you’re not doing it so you can boast about it. That’s the thing people forget: nobody ever hears it. No employer asks. Your friends don’t know it. The mark has almost no external audience.

Which means the only person that 70 is addressed to is the kid who earned it. And what it says to them is this: when I apply myself, the ceiling moves.

And that is what self-confidence actually is. Real confidence is evidence-based. It’s built from a small pile of occasions on which you did something you did not think you could do, and it cannot be gifted, bought, coached or faked. It has to be earned by the person, in their own name.

Which is why the HSC is quietly one of the biggest confidence-building opportunities we hand our kids , and one of the few we then talk them out of taking. A 17-year-old who sets a target, works for it for months and hits it has laid down a piece of evidence about themselves that no future setback can fully erase. That’s not about school. That’s about who they think they are.

We have a generation of kids backing themselves into corners before they’ve had a go. “I’m just not good at maths”. “I’m not academic”. “I’m hopeless at English, so I won’t bother”. That voice in their head starts young and hardens fast. If that story runs unchallenged for long enough, it stops being a story. It becomes the person.

The HSC, for a middle-band kid, is the first structured chance in their life to test whether that voice is telling the truth. To sit down and disprove themselves with nobody able to do it for them. And it almost never is telling the truth.

So the most useful sentence a parent can offer this October isn’t “It doesn’t matter”. It’s this: don’t do it for me, do it for yourself.

Not for the ATAR. Not for a degree. Not for your teachers or your friends. Do it so that in six weeks, when you get your results, you know something about yourself that you don’t know today.

None of which means ignoring the cost. The pressure is real and sometimes dangerous.

But effort matters.

Most of these kids will not get a 99, and in 10 years almost none of them will remember their number. What they’ll remember is whether they found out what they were capable of.

When kids genuinely apply themselves, they surprise themselves – that when they set their mind to something, anything is possible. You can’t teach a child that. They have to catch themselves doing it. The HSC, for all its faults, is the first real chance most of them get.

Liz Nable is a media and communications strategist, a small business advocate, a mother of three and a Year 12 parent this year.

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