Logo image
School socio-economic composition and student outcomes in Australia: Implications for educational policy
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

School socio-economic composition and student outcomes in Australia: Implications for educational policy

L.B. Perry and A. McConney
Australian Journal of Education, Vol.54(1), pp.72-85
2010
pdf
Perry__McConney_AJE_2010_pre-print.pdf286.78 kBDownloadView
Author’s Version Open Access
url
Link to Published Version *Subscription may be requiredView

Abstract

It is established that the socio-economic status (SES) of individual students is strongly associated with academic achievement but less is known about this relationship when both student and school socio-economic status are considered. To examine these associations at a finer grain, with the intent of informing educational funding policy, we subjected Australia's 2003 PISA data set to secondary analysis to better understand the reading and mathematics achievement of students with varying SES, across a range of school SES groupings. Our descriptive analyses show that increases in school SES are consistently associated with increases in students' academic performance, and that this relationship holds regardless of individual students' SES. In Australia, the socio-economic profile of the school matters substantially in terms of academic achievement We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of the current discussion around federal school funding policies, with particular attention given to the association of school composition with student achievement.

Details

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This output has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#10 Reduced Inequalities

Metrics

1900 File views/ downloads
186 Record Views

InCites Highlights

These are selected metrics from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool, related to this output

Citation topics
6 Social Sciences
6.11 Education & Educational Research
6.11.345 Educational Reform
Web Of Science research areas
Education & Educational Research
ESI research areas
Social Sciences, general
Logo image