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School rankings are built by media outlets from public results data, not by NESA or VCAA. Here is what the tables actually measure, and the four things they cannot tell you about a school.
Not the government. In New South Wales, NESA publishes results data including the lists of students achieving top band results. In Victoria, VCAA publishes similar aggregate data. Neither body produces a league table, and neither endorses one.
The tables that circulate every December and January are built by newspapers, education sites and private publishers from that public data. They choose the measure, the cut-off and the presentation, which is why two tables published in the same week can put different schools at the top.
That is not a scandal and it does not make the tables useless. It does mean a ranking is an editorial product rather than an official one, and the first question to ask of any table is what it chose to count.
Most NSW tables rank on the success rate: the proportion of a school’s HSC examination results that fall in the top band, Band 6, or its equivalent in extension courses. Our own top 150 schools table uses this measure.
The success rate is a sensible choice and it has a specific consequence worth understanding. Because it is a proportion rather than a count, a small school with a strong cohort can outrank a much larger school that produced many more top band results in total. A school of 60 students where 30 results are Band 6 has a higher success rate than a school of 300 where 120 are.
| What the measure does | What follows |
|---|---|
| Counts top band results as a share of all results | Rewards consistency across a cohort rather than a few outstanding students |
| Uses a proportion, not a total | Small schools can rank above large ones with more top results overall |
| Counts only the top band | A school moving students from Band 3 to Band 5 shows no improvement in the table |
| Uses examination results | School-based assessment is not visible in the ranking |
That third row is the one that matters most and it is almost never mentioned. A school doing excellent work with students who arrive at Band 2 and leave at Band 5 does not move up the table at all, because the measure only looks at the top. Our guide to HSC school rankings covers how the tables are assembled in more detail.
Victorian tables generally rank on the share of study scores of 40 or above, which is a different measurement from the NSW success rate even though the tables look alike. A study score of 40 sits roughly in the top eight per cent of students in a subject, so the measure captures strong results rather than exceptional ones.
Some Victorian tables also report the median study score, which behaves quite differently. A median describes the middle of a cohort and is harder for a handful of outstanding students to move, so it tends to favour schools that are strong throughout rather than at the top.
| Typical NSW measure | Typical VIC measure | |
|---|---|---|
| What is counted | Results in the top band | Study scores of 40 or above |
| Expressed as | A share of all examination results | A share of all study scores |
| Also sometimes reported | Top band counts by subject | Median study score |
| Who publishes the underlying data | NESA | VCAA |
| Who builds the table | Media and private publishers | Media and private publishers |
Because the two states measure different things, a NSW rank and a Victorian rank are not comparable. A family moving between states cannot read across, and any table claiming to rank schools nationally has made a choice that flattens the difference. Our guide to VCE school rankings sets out the Victorian measures.
Four things, and each of them is usually what a parent actually wants to know.
It cannot tell you how good the teaching is. A ranking measures the results a cohort produced, and a cohort is shaped by selection, by family circumstances and by who chose the school before any teaching happened. A selective school with an entrance examination has filtered its intake; a comprehensive school in the same suburb has not. Comparing their results measures the filter as much as the classroom.
It cannot tell you how much a school added. Two schools can produce identical results while one took students who arrived strong and the other took students a long way back. The second school did far more work and the table cannot see it.
It cannot tell you what your child will achieve. The ranking is a cohort statistic. Your child is one student, and the variation within any school is larger than the gap between most neighbouring schools in a table.
It cannot tell you whether your child will be happy there. No ranking measures whether a student will find friends, a teacher who notices them, or a subject they fall in love with. Those things predict results too, and they are not in the data.
Related course: Year 11 and 12 courses
A school’s rank is a cohort statistic; what a student does inside it is not. Matrix Year 11 and 12 courses teach a term ahead of school, so assessment lands on material already taught, practised and tested, whichever school a student attends.
Courses run nine weekly lessons of three hours, in classes capped at 15, on campus or online through Matrix+. See the Year 12 NSW courses and the VCE courses for subjects, fees and timetables.
Because of who is in them, which is decided before the teaching starts. A selective school admits students by competitive examination, so its intake is already among the strongest in the state. An independent school with high fees draws a cohort whose circumstances correlate strongly with academic results.
This is not an argument that those schools teach badly. Many teach well. It is an argument that a league table built on outcomes cannot separate the teaching from the intake, so a high rank is evidence of a strong cohort and only indirectly evidence of anything else.
The practical reading is to compare like with like. A comprehensive school’s position relative to other comprehensive schools in similar circumstances tells you something. Its position relative to a fully selective school tells you mainly that one has an entrance examination.
As one input among several, and a weak one. A table is a reasonable way to notice a school you had not considered, and a poor way to choose between two you are already looking at.
Four questions are worth more than a rank.
What happens to students in the middle of the cohort? Ask the school directly. Top band counts describe the strongest students. Most children are not in that group, and a school’s answer about its middle tells you a great deal about its culture.
What subjects are actually offered and run? A subject listed in a handbook but not timetabled in a given year is not available to your child. This is a concrete question with a concrete answer.
How does the school handle a student who is struggling in a subject? Again, ask. The answer is more predictive of your child’s experience than any table.
Would your child be happy there? It sounds soft and it is not. Students who are settled attend more, work more and ask for help earlier.
If you want to understand how results become ranks in the first place, our guides to ATAR and scaling and VCE study score scaling explain the machinery underneath the tables.
Because a cohort is small and a single year group varies. A secondary school might present 80 or 120 students to the HSC, and a measure built on the share of top band results will swing when one strong year group is followed by an ordinary one.
That volatility is the most misread feature of the tables. A school that drops twenty places has usually not become worse at teaching in twelve months. It has had a different set of students, or a strong cohort has graduated, or a handful of its best candidates chose different subjects. Parents reading a single year’s table as a verdict on a school are reading noise as signal.
The sensible correction is to look at three or four years together rather than the most recent one. A school that sits in a similar band across several years is telling you something stable. A school that appears once and vanishes is telling you about one cohort.
This is also why the top of a table is steadier than the middle. Fully selective schools draw from the whole state and refill their intake by examination every year, so their results are insulated from the local variation that moves everyone else around.
They exist, they are built the same way, and the same cautions apply with more force still.
Primary school tables are usually built on NAPLAN results, which were never designed for the purpose. NAPLAN is a point-in-time assessment of literacy and numeracy, and the national advice has consistently been against treating it as a measure of school quality or preparing children heavily for it. A primary ranking is a long way from a judgement about a school.
Selective school tables rank schools whose entire intake was chosen by examination, which makes the exercise close to circular: the schools with the most competitive entry produce the strongest results, and the table reports that back. It is useful for understanding the relative competitiveness of entry. It is not evidence about teaching.
In both cases the underlying question is whether a particular child will do well at a particular school, and a ranking is a poor instrument for it. The better instruments are a visit, a conversation with the faculty that teaches the subject your child cares about, and a frank question about what happens to students who are not in the top band.
Five questions, and they take about two minutes to answer on any table you are shown.
What is being counted? Top band results, study scores of 40 or above, a median, or something else. The measure determines everything downstream.
Is it a share or a total? A proportion favours small strong cohorts. A count favours large schools. Neither is wrong, but they produce different tables from the same data.
Which year is it? A single year is noisy. If the table does not say, treat that as a reason for caution.
Who built it, and from what? The underlying data is public and the choices are editorial. A publisher who explains their method has made a stronger table than one who does not.
What is missing? Every table leaves out school-based assessment, student growth, and everything that is not examinable. Those omissions are usually larger than the differences being reported.
A reader who asks those five questions will get more out of a ranking in two minutes than one who reads straight down the list looking for a familiar name.
It is worth saying plainly that none of this means the tables should be ignored. Results data is public for good reasons, and a parent is entitled to look at it. The argument here is narrower: a ranking answers the question it was built to answer, which is how one cohort’s examination results compared with another’s, and it gets stretched to answer questions it cannot. Used for what it is, it is a legitimate piece of information among others.
No government body does. NESA publishes HSC results data, including lists of top band achievements, and media outlets and private publishers build ranking tables from it. The same is true in Victoria, where VCAA publishes the data and others build the tables. A ranking is an editorial product rather than an official one.
It is the proportion of a school’s HSC examination results that fall in the top band, usually Band 6 or its extension equivalent. Because it is a proportion rather than a count, a small school with a strong cohort can rank above a larger school that produced more top band results in total.
No. NSW tables generally rank on the share of results in the top band, while Victorian tables generally rank on the share of study scores of 40 or above. These measure different things on different scales, so a rank in one state cannot be read across to the other.
No. A ranking measures the results a cohort produced, and that cohort was shaped by selection, fees and family circumstances before any teaching happened. Two schools with identical results may have done quite different amounts of work, and a table built on outcomes cannot distinguish them.
Not on its own. A table is useful for noticing schools you had not considered and poor for choosing between schools you are already weighing up. Questions about what happens to students in the middle of the cohort, which subjects actually run, and how the school supports a struggling student are more predictive of your child’s experience.
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