The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has updated the My School website for 2015. Aside from updating results about the 2014 school year, including NAPLAN data, the update also provides:

• seven years of performance data;
• student attendance data based on indigenous status; and
• latest financial figures for each school.

The 'look and feel' of the website has also been updated.

The Chair of ACARA, Professor Barry McCaw, has emphasised that 'My School allows for comparisons of results from schools with students from similar socio-educational backgrounds using the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) scale'.

ICSEA, as explained in this Fact Sheet, is a measure of educational advantage based on student factors, such as a parent's education and occupation, and school factors, such as geographical location and proportion of Indigenous students. This calculation produces a score which enables school performance to be compared.

The use of such websites to compare different schools has, in the past, been controversial. Critics have argued that the creation of comparative 'league tables' has a negative impact on schools. The site's terms of use prohibit a person from creating 'lists of comparative school performance from Content on this Site directly or indirectly for commercial purposes'.

Despite this, as The Age reports, newspapers such as The Canberra Times still publish 'league tables' of schools.

ACARA also publishes positive market research from Colmar Brunton, a market research company. Examples of these testimonials include:

• 'I felt that the website is more like a door to all educational information, actual information on schools. So many different things about education all in one place.' - Parent, state/Catholic secondary school.

The published examples do not include any negative feedback.

In an Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia (AHISA) press release, the AHISA's National Chair, Mr Phillip Heath, 'urged parents to look beyond the site's data when evaluating schools'.  Mr Heath, who is head of Barker College in NSW, continued his criticism of the numbers-based focus of the site by saying that 'successful schools are those where there are respectful relationships between everyone in the school community... human relations cannot be conveyed by a number, but they can be easily assessed by observation'.

The AHISA believes that 'national tests are only a very, very small part of what schools do' and at a minimum, parents should do further research on the site to 'get a feel for the full program that schools offer students, including co-curriculum opportunities'.

Does your school believe that MySchool focuses too much on numbers?