My School is where parents, educators and the community can find important information about each school in Australia. It’s run by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), an independent statutory authority. ACARA is responsible for collecting and reporting on data on Australian schools, running assessments like NAPLAN, and developing the Australian Curriculum.
The information you can find on My School can help you make informed decisions about your child’s education. Here are some key things to look out for.
You’ll find a landing page for each Australian school.
On each school’s page, you can find a short description of the school, as well as:
- student numbers and attendance rates
- results of NAPLAN testing and student progress over time
- school financial data
- staff numbers
- information on vocational education and training (VET) in schools (if applicable)
- senior secondary outcomes
- student attendance rates
- where available, post-school destinations
- the level of socio-educational advantage (SEA) of the school student body
- the proportion of students with an Indigenous background and students with a language background other than English
This information can help you to learn more about a range of schools before deciding which ones to explore further.
You can search for your local schools.
My School shows up to 20 schools located within 80 kilometres of the one you have selected, with links to the profile pages. The website will not automatically compare the NAPLAN results from these schools. My School only lets you compare ‘similar schools’, for a fair comparison.
This information can help you to:
- understand and see how your local school performs over time, and
- research a number of schools you are considering or that are in your catchment area.
You can compare NAPLAN results data.
My School provides comparative NAPLAN results for other Australian schools which are statistically similar with regard to their student population. 2018 was the first year of transition to NAPLAN Online.
This information can help you to get a snapshot of nationally comparable data on student performance in literacy and numeracy NAPLAN testing, alongside contextual information.
You can find a school’s ICSEA value.
ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage) is not a measure of school performance. Rather, it is a scale developed by ACARA to enable fair comparison between schools. Each school listed on My School has an ICSEA value. This value indicates the average level of educational advantage of students attending a particular school. It’s worked out by considering a range of student and school factors:
- parents’ occupation
- parents’ education
- a school’s geographical location
- the proportion of Indigenous students.
From this information, each school is given an ICSEA value, with 1000 the average to benchmark against.
This information can help you to compare a school’s NAPLAN results with other similar schools in a fair and meaningful way.
Visit the MySchool website for a snapshot of any Australian school and find answers to your burning questions.
