Year 12 public school students are pleading with authorities to be allowed to return to school full time, fearing they will by disadvantaged by the back-to-school plans laid out by the NSW government.
In NSW, students will return to class one day per week from 11 May in a staggered return to face-to-face classroom teaching, although "no student will be turned away" from supervised school learning.
Students and their parents have told SBS News they are worried their independent school counterparts will have the edge.
Year 12 student Ava Vosper attends Carlingford High School in Sydney's north west and has aspirations to study medicine at university.
She has started a petition to get all year 12 students back to NSW public schools full-time.
Year 12 student Ava Vosper wants to get into medicine but fears she'll be disadvantaged by missing out on face-to-face learning. Source: SBS News
"The HSC is high stakes and is a rank in the end, and if we are competing with schools who have that face-to-face connection, I'm really worried that the results won't be fair.
"Online teaching in the past term hasn't been easy. At home you are just given the content and you don't get worked through it and you don't get to easily ask questions and there has been work that I have struggled with that I haven't been able to properly seek help on."
Private schools can set their own rules and numerous schools including will restart full-time face-to-face teaching from mid-May.
New research commissioned by the Federal Education Department, released on Tuesday, found that up to due to online learning.
The research shows the effects of the shutdown are already being felt by the most vulnerable, including students who could find it difficult to recover from a learning loss, are already disengaged and from cultural and linguistically diverse and Indigenous backgrounds.
HSC student Shafia Shoib said online teaching is no substitute for face-to-face learning and is worried she will be left behind simply because she attended a public high school.
"It's a bit frustrating because we're so used to going to school for 12 years of our life, being able to learn the content from the teacher right in front of us and now we are sitting at home and trying to basically teach ourselves the work.
"The exams are not far off and I just hope that the NSW government can work out a way to help public school, particularly in year 12, to return faster than the staggered approach that's been proposed."
Shafia's father, Shoib Khalid said year 11 and 12 students should be prioritised over other students when it comes to returning to face-to-face learning because of the critical nature of the university entrance exams.
"This is the most important year in a group learning environment and kids learn a lot from each other.
"Learning online remotely is like an isolation sort of learning, sure you have technology but it really is not the same thing, just asking a question can take so much longer."
Premier Gladys Berejiklian said on Tuesday that the goal was to get students back to full-time classroom learning as soon as possible.
"We are very hopeful that the first few weeks of school returning will result in us being able to possibly truncate the process to have full time student attendance face-to-face quicker than we anticipated.
"But of course we wanted to introduce the staged approach to make sure all of our schools are ready for any unforeseen issues that might arise, but also ready in case there is a break out in a local community and they can respond quickly."
Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Source: AAP
Craig Peterson, the president of the Secondary Principals Council which represents public school principals in NSW, acknowledged concerns and anxiety over potential inequities and said schools are scrambling to make arrangements to get students back into class as soon as possible.
The Federal Government last week confirmed that social distancing rules that apply to adult gatherings won't be necessary in classrooms and new research over the weekend showed children are not COVID-19 "super-spreaders".
However, Mr Peterson told SBS News many staff and students still had anxiety and concerns about the potential risk of transmission of the disease.
"We're concerned that some of the non-government schools are bringing all students back full-time, more or less immediately.
"A lot of principals and teachers are putting extra processes in places are making opportunities for year 12 students to come in to school and work on their major works, but the problem we're having logistically is that bringing in all the students, particularly given the additional social distancing practices that we're trying to put in place to make sure that the return to school is safe, both for our students and for our staff, is creating some logistical nightmares for us."
Blaise Joseph, an Education Research Fellow from the Centre for Independent Studies said the Federal Government-commissioned research backs up what many people already know.
"Face-to-face teaching is the most effective way of absorbing new content and given that many students in government schools are being denied that at the moment, while some students in private schools for example, are still receiving it, that does definitely indicate that there will be a growing inequity as a result of the current arrangement.
Mr Joseph, who is a former secondary school teacher, hoped that universities would consider the "unfair" differences.
"We can hope that universities will take [that] into account in the coming years, but at the same time, I think schools are doing the best they can in difficult circumstances."
