School Sector Differences in Student Achievement in Australian Primary and Secondary Schools: A Longitudinal Analysis

Abstract

This article examines school sector differences in student performance Years 3, 5, and 7 in numeracy, reading, writing, spelling and grammar using data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children and the national testing program (NAPLAN). At each of the 3 Year levels, there are sizable school sector differences with students from independent schools exhibiting the substantially higher mean scores than Catholic and government school students. However, school sector differences in Years 3 and 5 largely disappear when taking into account students' socioeconomic position and especially prior ability. In Year 7, there is evidence of value added effects for attending an independent school in numeracy, reading and writing but the effect sizes are quite small (around 0.10). Fixed effects analyses confirm small significant value-added effects for attending independent schools for numeracy and reading. 1

Mapping schools' NAPLAN results: a spatial inequality of school outcomes in Australia

“…Educational results vary between and among schools and school systems (Marks, ) and between and among metropolitan and regional areas of Australia (ACARA, ). This article maps and examines the spatial patterns of primary school results in literacy and numeracy in metropolitan and remote Australia in relation to advantaged and disadvantaged suburbs in cities, and in government and non‐government schools in different locales.…”

“…Educational outcomes do differ between government and non‐government sectors at an aggregated level. NAPLAN (Marks, ) and senior secondary outcomes (Gemici et al ., ; Marks ) also differ, with the non‐government sector having a higher proportion of students with higher achievement. However, this dichotomous sectoral focus gives little attention to the spatial contexts for differences between government and non‐government schools, or to differences between schools in different locales within each sector.…”

Private exit, public exit, and achievement in secondary education

“…However, some of the existing literature has been at pains to stress how important prior achievement is to academic performance (see, e.g. Marks, ). We, therefore, re‐ran our mixed‐effects regressions with the addition of a school gain variable (to control for achievement in the Year 7 NAPLAN 2 years previous).…”

“…In order to identify ceteris paribus effects, we controlled for factors shown in the literature to affect NAPLAN performance: Indigeneity, school type (secondary, combined secondary and primary, and special schools for disabled students), ICSEA, student–teacher ratio, student–non‐teacher ratio, proportion of female students, proportion of students from a non‐English speaking background, exam participation rate, exam exemption rate, total income per student, and a measure of urbanity. Generally, the literature predicts that non‐indigenous female students from a high ICSEA English speaking background in well‐resourced urban schools outperform their peers in most domains (Drew et al., ; Marks, ; Teese, ). Indeed, these determinants of academic success form the basis of the federal government intervention into education (Gonski, ).…”

Educational attainment in the short and long term: was there an advantage to attending faith, private, and selective schools for pupils in the 1980s?

“…However, studies using more recent and cross-national data have found no advantage due to private schooling once social and academic selectivity into the schools and the school peer group are accounted for (Dronkers & Avram, 2009;Dronkers & Robert, 2008;Nghiem, Nguyen, Khanam, & Connelly, 2015;Sakellariou, 2017). The picture is not uniform across national contexts and educational stages (Jerrim, Parker, Chmielewski, & Anders, 2016;Marks, 2015). In view of the large private-state resource gap in Britain, it is possible that the private school advantage in Britain might be substantive, even if the differential is low or non-existent in other countries where the resource gap is also low (Ndaji, Little, & Coe, 2016).…”