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It is established that the socioeconomic status (SES) of individual students is strongly associated with academic achievement. However, less is known about this relationship when both student and school socioeconomic 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 dataset 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 socioeconomic 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.

Background/Context It is well established in the research literature that socioeconomically disadvantaged students and schools do less well on standardized measures of academic achievement compared with their more advantaged peers. Although studies in numerous countries have shown that the socioeconomic profile of a school is strongly correlated with student outcomes, less is understood about how the relationship may vary if both individual student and school socioeconomic status (SES) are disaggregated. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This study examines the relationship between school SES and student outcomes in more detail by asking two research questions. First, how does the association vary for students of different socioeconomic backgrounds? In other words, is the association stronger for students from lower SES backgrounds than for students from higher SES backgrounds? Second, how does the association vary across schools with different socioeconomic compositions? In other words, are increases in school socioeconomic composition consistently associated with increases in student academic achievement? Population/Participants/Subjects This study uses data from the Australian 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The sample includes over 320 secondary schools and more than 12,000 students from Australia. Research Design This study is a secondary analysis of data from the Australian 2003 PISA. Descriptive statistics are used to compare the average reading, mathematics, and science achievement of secondary school students from different SES backgrounds in a variety of school SES contexts. Conclusions The two main findings of the study are that increases in the mean SES of a school are associated with consistent increases in students’ academic achievement, and that this relationship is similar for all students regardless of their individual SES. In the Australian case, the socio-economic composition of the school matters greatly in terms of students’ academic performance.

Aim. This study sought to determine the prevalence and characteristics of workplace violence directed at a volunteer sample of nurses at one non-tertiary hospital. Respondents' reasons for not reporting these incidents were also investigated.Background. Incidents of workplace violence are increasing worldwide. However, no