How to Read a My School Profile
The ACARA My School website contains a wealth of data. This guide explains every metric and how to make accurate like-for-like comparisons.
ACARA's My School website has been publicly available since 2010, and in that time it has prompted more confused dinner-table conversations than almost any other government website I can think of. The data is there. Understanding what it means is another matter. Here is a plain-language walkthrough of every major section.
The school basics
The top section of every My School profile shows the school's sector (Government, Catholic, or Independent), school type (primary, secondary, combined, or special), year range, and location. These are facts, not metrics — but they establish the context for everything that follows.
Enrolment size matters more than parents realise. A school with 80 students and a school with 1,600 students are having fundamentally different educational experiences, and small-school NAPLAN data is statistically less reliable because cohort sizes are so small. Keep the size in mind when interpreting any numbers.
ICSEA — the most important section
The ICSEA score (national average 1,000) is the single most important piece of context for interpreting everything else. Higher = more advantaged community; lower = less advantaged. But don't just look at the number — look at the distribution chart underneath it, which shows the proportion of students from each ICSEA quartile. A school with 60% of students from the bottom quarter is a very different place from one with 60% from the top quarter, even if the aggregate ICSEA scores are similar.
Rule of thumb before comparing any two schools on NAPLAN: make sure their ICSEA scores are within 30–40 points of each other. If they're not, you're comparing communities more than schools.
NAPLAN — how to read the distribution
My School shows NAPLAN as a bar chart: the four proficiency levels across each domain for each year level tested. Here's what to focus on:
- Strong + Exceeding combined: This is the "at or above standard" percentage. Nationally, you'd hope to see 60–70% or more in this combined category, adjusted upward for higher-ICSEA schools.
- Needs Additional Support: This tells you how a school handles its most vulnerable learners. A school where 15–20% or more are in this category, particularly if the ICSEA doesn't obviously explain it, is worth investigating further.
- Trend direction: Never evaluate a single year. Click to see multiple years. A school moving upward over three to five years is making genuine improvement. A school that's been flat or declining for five years is telling you something meaningful.
- Suppressed data ("n/a"): Means fewer than five students sat the test in that cohort. This isn't a bad result — it's a privacy protection. It's most common in small schools or specific year levels.
Attendance rate
The annual attendance rate sits in a small section that many parents scroll past. Don't. A school with 84% annual attendance in a high-ICSEA suburban area is telling you something different from one with 84% in a remote community. In the suburban context, that's about 30 school days missed per student on average — a non-trivial amount.
Compare attendance rates between schools with similar ICSEA scores and similar remoteness classifications for the fairest comparison.
Staff data
FTE teacher numbers and the student-to-teacher ratio tell you about staffing levels. What they don't tell you is teaching quality — a school with a ratio of 14:1 with mediocre teachers is a worse educational experience than a school with 18:1 and extraordinary ones. Use this as very rough context, not as a quality metric.
Finance data
My School publishes per-student income and expenditure, broken down by source (government, fees, other). This is useful for understanding the resourcing environment but not particularly useful for predicting educational quality. High per-student expenditure doesn't mean better teaching.
What My School cannot tell you
Everything important about the daily experience of being a student at a school — the quality of individual teachers, whether a student who falls behind gets noticed, whether the culture is kind or harsh, whether the principal is inspiring or just maintaining — is invisible in this data. The My School profile narrows your shortlist. It doesn't make the decision. That requires you to turn up.