An open letter to the Minister for Arts and Education
The Honourable Minister John-Paul Langbroek, Chris Veraa, and the staff of QCAA,
Just last month, QPAC opened a new theatre, The Glasshouse Theatre, to much excitement and ceremony. As things stand, within ten years, we will be unable to staff that theatre, both on stage and off, with Queensland talent.
In 2017, 10,274 Queensland students were enrolled in Drama in Years 11 and 12. By 2021 – just four years later – that figure had collapsed to 6,431. More than 3,500 students had disappeared from Drama classrooms across this state, not because they lost interest in storytelling, performance, or the arts, but because a formula in the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre (QTAC) inter-subject scaling process had made it financially irrational for them to pursue the subjects they loved.
Desperate to score as high on their final results as possible, students across the state are now being warned as early as year nine to not pursue the arts or drama. The effect is being felt at high schools, at universities, and in the industry.
Since 2021, the decline has continued without interruption. The number of Queensland schools offering Drama fell from 303 to 279 between 2021 and 2024. Year 12 Drama completions fell from 3,131 in 2021 to 2,439 in 2023, recovering only marginally to 2,470 in 2024. That’s a net loss of 661 students, or 21%, in three years. QCAA’s own 2024 subject report describes this as a 1.27% increase on the prior year, a framing that obscures the structural reality: Drama enrolments have not recovered, the subject is being cut from school timetables across Queensland, and the trend that prompted Drama Queensland’s formal complaint in 2022 has not reversed. It has continued.
This letter is addressed to you because the crisis is now well-documented, peer-reviewed, and accelerating. This is having a massive impact on all of Queensland Arts, and sabotaging your own policy for Queensland Arts in the future.
3,500+ Queensland Drama students lost in four years (2017–2021)
38% decline in Drama enrolments since the new QCE system began
47 maximum scaled ATAR score for a perfect result in Drama in Practice
97 maximum scaled ATAR score for a perfect result in Mathematical Methods
ATAR scaling acts as a penalty for creativity
The Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank was designed to create a common measure for students from diverse educational backgrounds. Its inter-subject scaling process was meant to ensure fairness. In Queensland, it does the opposite.
Under QTAC’s current methodology, a student who achieves a perfect result in Drama in Practice receives a scaled score of just 47 at the 99th percentile. A student with an equivalent perfect result in Mathematical Methods receives 97. This is not a marginal gap. It is a chasm. And it is produced not by any difference in the effort, rigour, or achievement of the student, but by the subject they chose.
The problem is structural. QTAC’s scaling formula assumes that if many students perform well in a subject, the subject must be easier. This assumption is discriminatory when applied to the Arts. Drama, Dance, and Music are subjects where high performance is the product of years of dedicated practice, not the absence of difficulty. To penalise students for collective excellence is to fundamentally misunderstand what arts achievement looks like.
Drama Queensland, the peak body for drama educators in this state, identified this problem in precise terms when it called for an urgent review in February 2022: “Queensland operates in a deficit model, where even if a student receives a 99, this mark is scaled down.” The organisation also noted that Queensland’s drama scaling is significantly worse than New South Wales and Victoria, meaning it is objectively better for a student’s future to study Drama across the border than in their home state. That is a damning indictment of Queensland’s education system.
You’ve ignored this before
This crisis did not arrive without warning. In February 2022, Drama Queensland made a formal public call for an immediate review of the QTAC scaling formula and requested an urgent meeting with QTAC leadership. The statement was detailed, evidence-based, and named specific consequences already playing out in classrooms across Queensland.
What followed was silence. QTAC’s public response was to reiterate that students should choose subjects they enjoy and which meet prerequisites, the same platitude that Drama Queensland had already identified as “directly contradicted” by the published scaling data. No review was announced. No methodology changes were made. The scaling formula remained intact.
In the years that followed, nothing improved. The enrolment numbers continued to fall. Schools began collapsing Drama classes into composite groups, meaning students in a Year 11/12 Drama class might now be sharing a room and a teacher with Year 9/10 students, receiving a truncated curriculum that fails to meet the full scope of the syllabus. Teachers began being directed to teach outside their specialist area. Some Drama programs were discontinued entirely at the school level.
The complaint was lodged in good faith by professionals who could see the damage being done. The appropriate response, a serious, transparent review of the methodology, did not come. This letter exists because the institutional process failed.
The cascade: big impacts on the industry
It would be a mistake to view this as a problem confined to Year 11 and 12 classrooms. The consequences of depressed Drama enrolments ripple outward in ways that are now well documented.
In Schools
Researchers Professor Sandra Gattenhof (Queensland University of Technology) and Dr John Nicholas Saunders (Australian Catholic University), writing in the Australian Journal of Education in February 2026, described a cascading effect that begins the moment senior enrolments drop: “When a school sees a drop in enrolments in Year 12 Drama, and there’s only a handful of students, a school might decide they don’t have capacity to deliver that subject and so it will be cut. And once it’s removed from Year 11 and 12, then often it’s removed from Year 9 and 10, then often the elective in Year 7 and 8 then gets reduced — that all goes.”
This is not a theoretical model. It describes what is already happening in Queensland schools. Drama is disappearing from the bottom of the curriculum ladder because it has been made unattractive at the top.
The same researchers note that students in combined composite classes “are not getting the full range or scope of what the syllabus should be offering. They’re getting kind of a half-half version” – and that this further deters prospective students. The scaling problem thus creates its own feedback loop: fewer students select Drama, which reduces funding and class viability, which reduces the quality of what is offered, which further reduces student numbers.
In Universities
In November 2024, the National Advocates for Arts Education (NAAE) alerted the sector that Queensland University of Technology – this state’s flagship creative arts institution – had announced a pause on enrolments in its Bachelor of Creative Arts: Dance program, pending a review. That review subsequently expanded to include Acting, Drama, and Music. By 2025, QUT’s dance major had been recommended for closure. The acting program was restructured away from stage performance toward screen and digital formats.
This is a direct and traceable line: ATAR scaling discourages students from studying Drama. Fewer students with Drama experience graduate from high school. Fewer of those students enter tertiary performing arts programs. Tertiary programs cite declining enrolments to justify cuts and restructures. The degree infrastructure of performing arts in Queensland contracts.
QUT’s student guild described the result plainly: students who want to study dance or drama are being pushed toward the private sector, with expensive studio classes becoming the only viable alternative – placing performing arts training out of reach for students from lower-income backgrounds.
In the Industry
David Burton Mar 16, 2026
Your own government’s Queensland’s Time to Shine: Creative State Strategy 2025–2035 acknowledges that Queensland’s creative sector is experiencing critical skills shortages — specifically in technical production, business administration, and arts administration roles. It describes the creative workforce as essential to the state’s ambition to build an experience economy and deliver vibrant cultural programming in the lead-up to the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The Queensland Government cannot invest hundreds of millions of dollars in cultural institutions and Brisbane 2032 legacy programming while simultaneously operating an education system that empties the pipeline feeding those institutions. The ATAR scaling formula is doing exactly that: systematically, and at scale.
The solution
This is not a call to abolish ATAR, to dilute academic standards, or to pretend that all subjects are identical in character. It is a call for a methodology that is honest about what it is measuring, and one that does not punish students for choosing subjects that require creativity, discipline, and years of dedicated practice.
Specifically, we call on you all to take the following actions:
- Immediate commission of an independent review of QTAC’s inter-subject scaling methodology, with specific attention to the treatment of Drama, Dance, Music, and other Arts subjects. This review should include representation from arts educators, performing arts peak bodies, and equity advocates – not only mathematicians and statisticians.
- Transparent publication of the full methodology used to calculate scaled ATAR scores, including the specific variables, exclusions, and assumptions applied to each subject. The current level of opacity is incompatible with QTAC’s stated commitment to accountability.
- Alignment with interstate practice, ensuring that Queensland students studying Drama are not systematically disadvantaged relative to students in NSW and Victoria in a shared national tertiary admissions landscape.
- A moratorium on further cuts to performing arts programs in Queensland state schools and universities while the review is conducted, to prevent further irreversible damage to the sector.
- Direct ministerial engagement with Drama Queensland, the Queensland Teachers’ Union, and the National Advocates for Arts Education, who have been raising these concerns through appropriate channels since 2022 without receiving a substantive response.
Drama is not a soft subject. It is where students learn to inhabit other perspectives, to communicate under pressure, to collaborate, to fail and revise and try again. These are not peripheral skills. Arts education nurtures innovation, creativity and leadership. They are the skills of every industry — and they are the skills this state will need in abundance to deliver on its promise of a culturally vibrant, creatively led Queensland by 2032 and beyond.
Arts education is also the birthplace of massive cultural exports such as Bluey, and stars like Margot Robbie, the Hemsworths, and more.
The students who should be filling the stages and studios and screen productions of that future are, right now, being quietly counselled away from Drama by a formula that tells them their passion is not worth as much as someone else’s. Some of them are listening. And they are choosing different subjects. Not because they want to, but because the system has made it financially punishing not to.
This has been allowed to happen for too long. A formal complaint was made in 2022. It was not answered. The enrolments fell further. The university programs contracted. The industry pipeline narrowed. There is no more time for silence.
Sincerely,
Dr. David Burton
Playwright, director and arts educatorSubscribe
KEY SOURCES
Drama Queensland, ‘Drama Queensland calls for a formal review into the process of ATAR inter-subject scaling results by QTAC’, 1 February 2022. dramaqueensland.org.au/dq-statement/
Drama Queensland, ‘Review of Arts Courses at QUT’, November 2024. dramaqueensland.org.au/news/
Gattenhof, S. & Saunders, J.N., ‘Polycrisis: Arts and Creative Education in Australia’, Australian Journal of Education, Sage Publications, February 2026. doi.org/10.1177/00049441261421275
QTAC, ATAR Report 2021 / ATAR Report 2024. qtac.edu.au
Arts Queensland, Queensland’s Time to Shine: Creative State Strategy 2025–2035. arts.qld.gov.au
National Advocates for Arts Education (NAAE), Response to QUT Creative Arts Review, November 2024.
EducationHQ, ‘’Polycrisis’ threatens future of arts education in Aussie schools: researchers’, 10 February 2026. educationhq.com