What Is ACARA and How Is Australian School Data Collected?
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority — who they are, what data they publish, and how it reaches My School.
When I first started trying to understand Australian school data properly, I kept hitting the same wall: the data existed, it was published, it was even downloadable, but none of the places explaining it seemed to agree on exactly what it meant or where it came from. ACARA, My School, NAPLAN, ICSEA, SEIFA — the acronyms multiplied like rabbits. So here, as clearly as I can put it, is where Australian school data actually comes from and what it's worth.
What ACARA is, and isn't
ACARA — the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority — is a federal statutory body. It was established in 2008 under the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority Act. Its three core functions are: developing and maintaining the Australian Curriculum; administering the NAPLAN national assessment; and publishing school-level data through My School.
ACARA does not run schools. It does not regulate teachers. It does not set school fees. It is an information body — it collects, analyses, and publishes data that has been submitted to it by states and territories. This distinction matters because it means the quality of ACARA's data depends significantly on the quality of what schools and state departments submit.
The My School pipeline
Here is roughly how the data you see on My School gets there. Schools submit information to their state or territory education authority (the Department of Education in each state). State departments aggregate and quality-check this data, then submit it to ACARA. ACARA processes it, applies its own calculations for derived metrics like ICSEA, and publishes it through the My School website.
This pipeline introduces lag. ACARA typically publishes each year's school data in the first half of the following year. So when you look at a school profile in mid-2025, you are typically seeing data from the 2024 school year. WhatSchool Australia displays the publication year alongside all data, because it matters — a school's staffing, leadership, or community profile can change significantly in twelve months.
What ACARA publishes, exactly
Each annual school profile on My School (and WhatSchool) includes:
- School identifiers: ACARA ID, name, address, sector, school type, year range, and contact information
- Student population data: Total enrolments, proportion of students who identify as Indigenous, proportion with a language background other than English (LBOTE)
- Community context: ICSEA score and ICSEA distribution (showing what proportion of students come from each quartile of the ICSEA distribution)
- NAPLAN results: For applicable year levels — the percentage of students in each proficiency band (Exceeding, Strong, Developing, Needs Additional Support) for reading, writing, language conventions, and numeracy. Results are suppressed where fewer than five students sat the test to protect student privacy.
- Attendance: Annual average attendance rate
- Staff and finance: Full-time equivalent teacher and non-teaching staff counts, student-to-teacher ratio, and income and expenditure data
The suppression problem
One of the most frustrating aspects of ACARA data — and one that WhatSchool cannot work around — is the suppression of results for small cohorts. If fewer than five students in a school's Year 3 cohort sat a NAPLAN test, ACARA does not publish those results, to protect student privacy.
For very small schools — and Australia has many of them, including small community schools in remote areas — this means NAPLAN data may be unavailable for multiple year levels across multiple years. Which creates an unfortunate situation: the schools least visible in the data are often those serving the most vulnerable communities, where data-driven accountability is arguably most important.
What ACARA data is good for
At its best, ACARA data provides a consistent, nationally comparable picture of what school communities look like and how students in those communities are performing in foundational literacy and numeracy. This consistency is genuinely valuable — before My School, Australian parents had no reliable way to compare schools across state boundaries, or even between suburbs.
What it cannot tell you is how happy students are, whether teachers are excellent or mediocre, whether the principal has a vision or is treading water, or whether the culture of a school is one you want to send your child to. For those things, you need to visit, ask questions, and talk to people who've sent their children there. Data is context. It is not a substitute for community.