Parents pounce on website that ranks schools

Australian parents yesterday overwhelmed a new federal school rating website, causing it to crash as they ignored teachers' warnings that they would be misled by data that matched literacy and numeracy with social indicators.

As repairs were made to myschool.edu.au - a site designed to take 2350 hits a second - Education Minister Julia Gillard said My School's problems had confirmed that parents wanted to be able to compare the performance of schools across the country.

"We were expecting huge demand," she said.

But opponents continued to criticise the site, warning that it would lead to inaccurate "league tables" that would hit struggling schools in disadvantaged areas.

The Australian Education Union, which represents the nation's public school teachers, will refuse to do the next round of national testing that provides the raw data for the system unless the Government ensures it does not lead to discriminatory tables.

"Teachers, parents and principals are united in their opposition to damaging league tables which rank schools according to their test results," New South Wales Teachers Federation president Bob Lipscombe warned before the site went online.

The My Schools site has sparked bitter controversy since it was first proposed by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Labor Government, a divisive debate that will continue as Australia heads into this year's federal election.

It is designed to both allow parents to assess the standard of their local schools and compare it with the performance of similar schools throughout the nation, and to help the Government identify areas of need.

"Just because kids are from a poor home doesn't mean that they can't get a great education," Gillard told ABC radio.

"We know that the poorest kids can achieve really well with a great education, but it will certainly enable us to compare similar schools, and it certainly enables us to know where the most disadvantaged school communities are."

My School rates the performance of 10,000 public and private schools using data from the National Assessment Programme Literacy and Numeracy tests, conducted over the past two years among students in years three, five, seven and nine.

It also includes a "disadvantage" index, calculated on parents' incomes, numbers of indigenous students and year 12 retention, and based on an average score of 1000.

Using this data, schools are assembled into groups of 60 statistically similar institutions, allowing parents to compare their schools with others in a similar socio-economic range, and with national average scores for reading, writing, spelling, grammar, punctuation and numeracy.

The site provides these details for each school, including average national scores for comparison with national figures, and the average results for similar schools with which they have been grouped.

A simple colour coding demonstrates performance against national averages, with the colour deepening according to position above or below the norm: red for below, white for average, and green for above.

One analysis by the Australian, which managed to avoid yesterday's launching crash, showed surprising results.

The newspaper listed a number of elite private schools whose performances, while above the national average, fell below those of similar public schools.

But critics have warned that comparisons based on My School data will not be accurate and could present distorted pictures that could damage poorer schools.

The Independent Education Union, representing private school teachers, said the national tests, which were designed to assess individual students' achievement, produced only a snapshot of one test on a single day in the school year.

"Portrayal of alleged underperforming schools in a simplistic league table has the very real risk of damaging school communities," federal secretary Chris Watt said.