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School rankings may feel like a simple guide for parents, but the numbers often reveal more about the families inside a school than about its quality – and they measure nothing beyond literacy and numeracy.
I take my children to scouts and volunteer as a leader because, as a child, it taught me skills that were genuinely useful in adulthood: teamwork, problem-solving, resilience and love for the environment. But where we live, extracurricular activities go quiet whenever an exam for an opportunity class, selective school or NAPLAN comes around.
A significant number of children attend coaching colleges, a format that was banned in China in 2021 in an effort to ease pressure on students and parents.
Still, parents in Australia who prioritise academic results and can pay for coaching, or can afford to move to catchment areas with higher-ranked schools, will naturally do so.
If academic results are the most important thing in a child’s education, then following school rankings makes sense. But it is worth unpacking which rankings to look at, and what they actually tell us.
I strongly encourage parents to start at the MySchool website and compare schools of interest rather than a newspaper league table. The website offers a more nuanced and reliable picture. The rankings you see otherwise often rely on raw NAPLAN scores and that masks their interpretation.
Every school is assigned the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA), a standard adjustment tool that appears by default on the MySchool website precisely because raw NAPLAN scores do not account for the socio-economic mix around a school. This matters because a child’s performance in test scores depends both on the school and on what happens at home.
Parents on low incomes are unable to move catchments and have more pressing worries than NAPLAN score performance, all of which affect their ability to support their child’s academic success in ways unrelated to the quality of their schooling. When adjusting for ICSEA using the scores published on MySchool, the order of top-performing schools can shift significantly. For example, in a recently published ranking, the first and fourth schools swapped places when adjusted for ICSEA.
There is a good reason that ICSEA is applied by default on the MySchool website: it compares a school’s results against those of schools with students from a similar background – apples to apples, not apples to oranges. Yet even when comparing across schools with similar socio-demographics, ICSEA cannot measure parental motivation.
Parents from a similar socio-demographic have different educational priorities. I value languages, emotional development, teamwork and music. Other parents with the same income but different priorities may choose schools based solely on sports or academic results. Parents who strongly prioritise academic success often drive results upwards through involvement, expectations at home and paid tutoring.
You cannot tell from NAPLAN results alone whether a top-ranked school is exceptionally good at teaching, or whether it enrols an exceptionally motivated community of families who would produce strong results almost anywhere. The answer is probably some of both, but a ranking cannot tell you how much of each. This also creates a rat-race cycle: strong results attract academically motivated families, whose children produce strong results, which attracts more of the same, which puts more pressure on children.
MySchool has another useful tool for assessing teaching impact by looking at how students progress over time. It shows how the same group of children fare between year 3 and year 5, and how their progress compares with similar ICSEA schools nationally.
This is exactly the approach used in reporting by The Sydney Morning Herald this week, which tracked gains from year 3 to year 5 across more than 2000 primary schools and identified high-progress schools regardless of their initial raw score rankings. Interestingly, leading schools – Holy Family in Granville, Bankstown Public and Rydalmere East – do not appear in simple rankings. They serve less advantaged communities but are moving students forward. That is effective teaching at its best.
A school that takes students who are behind and moves them ahead is doing something different from a school that takes students who start ahead and keeps them at the same level. Only the former tells you something about teaching impact. A ranking cannot distinguish between holistic educational quality and strategic test preparation.
NAPLAN is a tool for diagnosing literacy and numeracy foundations. It does not measure higher-order thinking, creativity, problem-solving, social-emotional development, resilience or curiosity. These are some of the attributes that define us as contributing members of society, and schools that teach narrowly to lift their test scores reduce opportunities for broader learning.
When considering schools, if academic results are what you value most, start at MySchool. Look at the progress of students to understand which schools are genuinely adding value relative to their demographics. But whatever your priorities, visit the school and ask the principal what they do when there is bullying. Look at the playground interactions and find out if it aligns with your family’s values. Talk to other parents. Work out what matters to you and what suits your child and decide from there. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, and no ranking can provide one.
Marian Vidal-Fernandez is an associate professor at the School of Economics at the University of Sydney and an associate investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course.
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Marian Vidal-Fernandez is an associate professor at the School of Economics at the University of Sydney and an associate investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course.From our partners
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