A report card on Australian schools

How do we perform on equity?

There is one further consideration to be taken into account in a snapshot of how Australia performs on the international scene and that is how we perform on equity. If we compared two students of similar intellectual ability, one from a group of low socio-economic status (SES) and one from a group of high SES, would they be likely to perform just as well?

The level of equity is measured by graphing individual student's results against their SES and drawing a line of best fit through the result. As one would expect, in all countries there is a slope upwards from low socio-economic status to high, but what is significant is whether this slope is flatter or steeper. Hong Kong has a high level of equity and the graph is relatively flat, where Australia is closer to the OECD average. Again there are significant differences within Australia. South Australia has the highest level of equity and the ACT is the most inequitable.

The strength of the relationship between student performance and SES can also be shown as a mathematical figure, where a higher figure indicates a higher level of inequality. The following table places the countries in the same order of achievement as the first table and shows their inequity index:

While it is clear that there is not a direct link between equity and performance – as Shanghai, Singapore and New Zealand indicate – it goes without saying that raising the results for disadvantaged students in Australia would, apart from improving the life chances of individuals, significantly raise our mean international performance.

Australia continues to perform reasonably well in English and Science but the three things we need to be concerned about are: the fact that we are slipping behind overall; our results in Maths; and our ranking on equity. To what extent are these are particularly Australian problems and what we can learn from other countries successes?