Nationally comparable data about school performances should be reported to the public, but should not be used to create league tables, according to a new paper from the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).  

The paper, Reporting and Comparing School Performances, has been prepared for the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs to provide advice on national schools data collection and reporting for school evaluation, accountability and resource allocation.

Comparable data should be collected about schools’ student backgrounds, student outcomes, numbers and qualifications of teachers, sources of funding, and amounts of fees paid by parents.

Education authorities and governments should use this data to monitor school performances and to identify schools that are performing unusually well or unusually poorly given their circumstances.

The data should also be reported publicly, so that parents and the public can make informed judgements about, and meaningful comparisons of, schools.  

Parents need a wide range of detailed information about schools’ outcomes so they can choose the right school for their children – but schools work to promote many different kinds of outcomes for their students.  

Simplified comparisons of schools, such as league tables, ignore this broader context by restricting the range of information that can be provided.  League tables also encourage ‘rank order’ interpretations that have been damaging to schools and students in the past, and focus attention on some aspects of schooling at the expense of other outcomes that are as important but not as easily measurable.

It is popular in some parts of the world to adjust data to fit ‘measures’ of school performance and to report these measures publicly in league tables – but there are very sound technical and educational reasons why school measures of this kind should not be used for public reporting and school comparisons.

Instead, ACER proposes provision of information in the form of school profiles or comparisons of ‘like’ schools.  

School profiles allow an almost limitless range of information to be presented, while still allowing schools to be sorted by factors such as geographic location, school fee structure or religious affiliation.

If schools are to be compared, a ‘like-schools’ methodologies allow parents, the public and education systems to compare outcomes for schools in similar circumstances. 

Comparing only like schools would also allow measures of school performance to be reported without adjustment: factual data about a school, and not the results of secondary analyses and interpretations that are open to debate.

Vigilance is required to ensure that the public reporting of data does not have negative and unintended consequences for schools, such as from the reporting of the socio-economic backgrounds of students in a school, or of the financial circumstances of struggling, small schools.

Overall, however, if information is presented in a way that does not encourage ranking or identification of individuals, almost all school data could be reported publicly.

The full report, Reporting and Comparing School Performances, by ACER researchers Geoff Masters, Glenn Rowley, John Ainley and Siek Toon Khoo, is available for download from ACER's research repository

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