VCE 2019: Ballarat Clarendon College achieves best scores in the state

The 155-year-old Uniting Church school topped the state based on a combination of its median VCE study score and the percentage of study scores of 40 or more in 2019, The Age reports.

It achieved a median study score of 39 this year, equal to Bialik College, a private Jewish school in Hawthorn East that finished on top in 2018. Forty-five per cent of its study scores were at least 40, putting it slightly ahead of Bialik College with 44.3 per cent.

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Clarendon traditionally ranks among the top 10 schools in Victoria.

The prep-to-year 12 school's results rose sharply this year however, having been ranked the 13th-best in 2018.

The Age has collected school performance data dating back to 2003, and this is the first time that Ballarat Clarendon College has been ranked the top school of the year.

The only other schools that have topped the rankings in the past 16 years are Mac.Robertson Girls' School, Melbourne High School, Mount Scopus Memorial College and Bialik College.

See Ballarat Clarendon College's sharp rise here.

Principal David Shepherd said the prep-to-year 12 school worked hard to give all students a strong grounding in literacy and numeracy in the early years of their education.

"We have a teaching group who make certain that ... we catch the good teaching outcomes, figure out how the best instructional strategies work and then apply them," he said.

"The pool of people you get to choose from is smaller, because most people have to lift up their lives and come and live in Ballarat.

"[But] we spend a lot of time professionally developing our staff, and what tends to happen now is that when we let them develop mastery over what they're doing, they tend to want to stay with us."

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