I think I should have worded my question a bit differently. I'm not overly concerned about her school performance nor about her lack of direction. She has many great qualities and while she could do much better at school than she currently is, I have some strategies for encouraging her and I think things will work themselves out in the end. She's the sort of kid who will find her way and TBH after getting here as someone who didn't attend school, had taken drugs and was being taken off for weekly drug and alcohol tests, whose boyfriend was a drug dealer and who was very close herself to being put in juvenile detention ... I think she's doing pretty well and keeping her safe and out of trouble matters much to me than her being a stellar student.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm used to grades A-E being given throughout high school. That makes it pretty easy to tell how you're child is tracking. These days they're only given a Satisfactory or Not Satisfactory until they do a VCE subject and then it's A-E.

So Satisfactory or Not Satisfactory doesn't allow me to gauge very well whether she's in the top bit of Satisfactory (As and Bs equivalent) or the average/below average (Ds and Es). My interpretation from having looked at her report and taking into account the only A-E score she got (ie. the D) is that she's doing averagely. That's really all I'm after - help interpreting her results so that we have a realistic view of how she's going. I mean, look, I know that she's not going to get into medicine/law etc. that's commonsense but, not having been through the Australian school system, I had no idea whether average VCE results would get her into uni. Nor am I hellbent on getting her into uni, if that makes sense, I just don't want her to be thinking for the next two years that she's going to uni if she's way off the grade. It's really about giving her a realistic view of how she's going so SHE can understand what's going to be required of her. I think looking up the average VCE score (53.9) has helped me get a handle on it - that would basically mean that she would struggle to get into a lot of Melbourne-based unis and TBH that might be the greatest motivator I could ever use. If she knows that she might have to look at going to a regional uni, I think we might see a significant extra effort being put in. She won't be keen to leave the bright lights of Melbourne!

How does everyone else work out how their non-VCE child is doing? How d'you tell from the report? Or d'you base it more on what the teachers say?