How to Read a My School Profile: A Parent's Field Guide
The ACARA My School website contains a wealth of data — this guide explains every metric and how to compare it accurately.
The first time I looked at a My School profile, I came away knowing approximately three things: the school existed, it had students, and it had received some money from somewhere. The website has improved considerably since then, but the data remains genuinely confusing if you don't know what you're looking at — and the stakes of misreading it are real.
This is a field guide to each major section. Not the official definitions (those are on the ACARA website), but what each number actually means in practice, when to take it seriously, and when to treat it with the appropriate skepticism.
The basics: school profile
Sector: Government, Catholic, or Independent. This is straightforward — it tells you who runs the school.
School type and year range: This tells you whether a school is primary (Prep/Kindergarten to Year 6 or 7), secondary (Year 7 or 8 to Year 12), combined (P–12), or a special school. The year range matters: some "primary" schools in particular states run to Year 7, while others run to Year 6. In Queensland and South Australia, secondary school starts in Year 8; in other states, Year 7.
Total enrolments: The total number of students enrolled. Useful for understanding the school's scale. Under 100 students is a very small school; over 2,000 is genuinely large. For interpreting NAPLAN data, note that the smaller the enrolment, the more year-on-year variation you should expect in results.
The ICSEA section
This is the single most important section for contextualising everything else, and the one most often misread.
The ICSEA score (national average: 1,000) shows the socio-educational profile of the school's community. Higher = more advantaged. But the ICSEA distribution chart — which shows what proportion of students come from each quartile of the national ICSEA distribution — is even more informative. A school with 65% of students in Bottom Quarter tells a very different story from one with the same overall ICSEA score but a more evenly distributed student body.
Never, under any circumstances, compare one school's NAPLAN results with another school's without checking that their ICSEA scores are in the same ballpark. If you don't do this, you are not comparing schools — you are comparing communities.
NAPLAN results
My School shows the percentage of students in each proficiency band for each domain (reading, writing, language conventions, numeracy) at each year level tested (Year 3, 5, 7, 9 — not all schools teach all year levels). The proficiency bands are Exceeding, Strong, Developing, and Needs Additional Support.
Three things to look for:
- The percentage in Needs Additional Support: A school where 25–30% or more of students are consistently in the lowest band has a significant cohort with foundational literacy or numeracy gaps. This is worth knowing — and worth asking the school about directly.
- The trend, not the year: One year's results can be anomalous for multiple reasons: a particularly large or small cohort, an unusual year, COVID-era disruption. Look at three or more data years if available. A consistent trend up or down is far more informative than a single year's snapshot.
- Suppression: Where results show "n/a" or are absent, it usually means fewer than five students sat the test. Do not interpret absence of data as absence of results — it just means the cohort was too small to publish without privacy risk.
Attendance
Published as the annual average attendance rate. The national average is around 88%. Schools below 83% in non-remote contexts deserve closer investigation — not necessarily criticism, but questions about what's driving it and what the school is doing in response.
In remote and very remote contexts, attendance rates below 80% are unfortunately common and often reflect structural factors (housing instability, health challenges, travel distance) rather than school-level failures.
Staff data
My School shows full-time equivalent (FTE) teacher and non-teaching staff, and the student-to-teacher ratio. A ratio below 12:1 is genuinely small — individual attention is structurally available. A ratio above 20:1 in a primary school is worth noting.
One caveat: the FTE figure includes all teachers, including those on part-time arrangements, replacement teachers, and specialist staff. The classroom teacher ratio experienced by individual students may differ from the headline number.
Financial data
My School publishes income per student (from government and private sources) and broad expenditure categories. This data is often scrutinised in discussions about funding equity between schools. Its usefulness for individual parents is more limited — it tells you more about the school's resourcing environment than about the quality of what happens in classrooms.
One thing worth knowing: government schools that appear to have low per-student income on My School often receive significant non-monetary resources — buildings, grounds, shared services — that reduce the need for cash spending.
The thing My School cannot tell you
I'll end with the same caveat I give everyone who asks me about school data: My School and WhatSchool together give you a reasonably rich picture of what a school looks like from the outside. They cannot tell you whether the teaching is inspired or pedestrian, whether the culture is kind or harsh, whether the principal is the kind of leader who changes lives or who is mostly processing paperwork. For those things — the things that matter most — you need to turn up. Visit. Talk to parents. Ask uncomfortable questions. The data is the starting point, not the whole journey.