Schools which encourage weaker students to stay at home during national ranking tests to boost overall performance scores will have that information published on the Federal Government's My School website, to be launched on Thursday.
The site, which for the first time will show parents the performance of nearly 10,000 government and non-government schools on an equal basis, will allow parents and the media to check participation data during annual National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy testing to ensure individual schools don't attempt to artificially skew the results.
Wealthy schools which perform well against the national average but are coasting compared with similar schools will also be revealed, with the data showing how an individual school performs not only against the national average, but also against a group of 60 schools around the nation with a similar demographic profile.
Chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority that will run the site, Professor Barry McGaw, said there would be no single number which allowed simplistic comparisons of schools in an area.
''There has been a lot said about the impact this will have on [poor performing] schools, but it will be interesting to see the impact on wealthier schools as well,'' Professor McGaw said.
Each school will be assigned a number ranking its comparative level of advantage or disadvantage based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data taken from the home address of each student.
Based on that school's index of community socio-educational advantage number, parents will be able to see how their school performs against 60 statistically similar schools, which may be located anywhere in the country.
Information on attendance rates, number of indigenous students, the proportion of students going to further education, work or other training will all be available and schools will be given 200 words to promote themselves.
The website will provide information including colour-coded scores of schools' performance in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy. It means that while a school may be performing well overall, a parent will be able to easily identify an area in their child's year where a school is performing poorly.
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