The formula used to calculate socio-educational advantage in ACT schools is under review because of apparent anomalies in the highly-advantaged jurisdiction.
The index of community socio-educational advantage (ICSEA) is a scale that is calculated for every school in Australia to make comparisons based on the level of educational advantage that students bring to their academic studies.
It is displayed on each school's MySchool page and is used to predict NAPLAN performance and determine whether a cohort is overperforming or underperforming compared to students of a similar background.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) is conducting a review of how the calculation, which gives each school a value from about 500 for extreme disadvantage to 1300 for high advantage, is applied to ACT schools.
"ACARA is reviewing how the ICSEA model is operating with regard to the ACT to ensure it is working consistently as intended in identifying socio-educational advantage and predicting NAPLAN performance," an ACARA spokesperson said.
"The review is considering the work undertaken by the Centre for International Research on Education Systems (Victoria University) in its report on the operation of the NAPLAN socio-educational advantage model, noting that the report was jointly overseen by ACARA and the ACT Education Directorate. This work is still ongoing."
The Victoria University report was finalised in October 2021 but has not been publicly released. An Education Directorate spokesperson said the report was prepared as part of a project approved by the Senior Education Officials Committee, but the committee had not yet considered the report.
Ms Berry's office did not directly respond to questions about the review.
Ms Berry previously attacked the ICSEA values, which take into account parents' job title and highest level of education, the remoteness of the school and the percentage of Indigenous students at the school.
"The method for predicting student scores does not work in the ACT," Ms Berry said in a statement in 2020.
"The ACT has a predominately public service workforce where many people hold the job title 'manager' across a range of employment classifications. 65 per cent of ACT students have a parent with a bachelor's degree or above, compared to the national average of 35 per cent.
"These two factors together artificially increase predicted NAPLAN scores. Comparing the predicted and actual scores results in a large difference that falsely suggests underperformance of ACT schools, both government and non-government."
Several reports have found ACT public schools consistently perform worse than similar schools in other jurisdictions despite a relatively high amount of public funding per student.
An ACT Auditor-General's report into performance information in ACT public schools found the majority of schools' NAPLAN results were lower than schools with similar ICSEA values.
In 2016, Centre for International Research on Education Systems at Victoria University released a report commissioned by the Education Directorate which closely examined NAPLAN performance. It found "after taking account of intake and context differences, ACT government schools on average achieve negative results on every measure".
A 2018 data analysis by the Australian National University also found that ACT public and non-government schools were underperforming compared with equivalent schools.
A Grattan Institute report from 2018 found ACT students made less growth in NAPLAN from year to year than students in the rest of the country.
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