Page 3077 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
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agreed and how these changes will be reflected in the future testing and on the My School website?
MR BARR: I thank Ms Hunter for the question. Education ministers did, indeed, discuss further additions to the My School website at our meeting in Perth. We will be having subsequent meetings to hear back from ACARA, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority and also from the work of the working group that the now Prime Minister and former Deputy Prime Minister and minister for education established.
That working group consisted of representatives from across the education sector—the Australian Education Union, experts in data performance management within the education sector, academics and representatives from other key stakeholders. There were a number of proposals discussed, some of which pre-dated this particular ministerial council that was held in Perth last month, that go to the decisions of the ministerial council from months before.
Perhaps the most important element that people will see when the My School website is updated later this year is the addition of information on the financial resources available to schools. That information will be broken down by the proportion of funding that the school receives from the federal government, from the territory government and from its own private sources. It will also include information on the level of capital expenditure that is undertaken at the school.
Discussions in relation to that capital expenditure line have been detailed because, by its very nature, capital expenditure tends to be lumpy. It comes in great amounts but at infrequent intervals. For example, all schools will benefit, of course, from various elements of the building the education revolution. Primary schools, depending on their size, are receiving millions of dollars of additional funding towards a range of projects. But under the national school pride element of the building the education revolution, schools are receiving up to a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a range of projects across their campuses.
We are also looking at further refinement of the ICSEA measure, the index of community socio-educational advantage. It goes to the issue of how you group like schools across Australia. ICSEA is the most sophisticated tool of analysis that we have available to compare the socio-educational advantage of school communities. It is certainly a step beyond the postcode analysis that was utilised by the former Howard government to derive its SES school-based funding model.
ICSEA breaks that down beyond the postcode to a census collection district—groups of households of up to 200 to 250 households. It gives a better picture of relative socio-educational and socio-economic advantage. ICSEA also looks at a range of factors—for example, home internet connection, the level of the parents’ education and a range of other factors beyond just a straight economic analysis to determine the level of socio-educational advantage that a community has.
ICSEA is a powerful tool to be able to group like schools. However, the more detail that is available there, the better—particularly for territory schools. We have recognised that other jurisdictions have been collecting a range of data in their
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