Right: A "league table", listing schools in Britain; Australian educators have concerns that this will happen here, with private firms utilising My School website information.Further implications
It is not possible to deny the very strong initial interest in the My School site. My School ranked as the 28th most visited website by Australian Internet users on 28 January across All Categories and the number three Education website by Australian Internet users.The Computers and Internet - Search Engines industry delivered 61.4% of upstream traffic to My School in the week of its launch. Search terms containing a variation of My School (including misspellings), accounted for 87.9% of all upstream visits from Search Engines. The high level of branded search terms indicate the PR success and the high level of public awareness of the My School website launch.
However, within five days My School had fallen out of the top 100 websites (ranking 105th on 1 February) as the news and debate subsided, and has since fallen to 860th on 15 February. This may mean that parents and others have had their initial questions answered and will no longer be interested in the same way until new data is available - sometime after May this year when the next round of NAPLAN tests will have been completed.
At this stage it is far too early to say the impact this site will have on schools and on school community expectations. It is possible that the ready availability of this data could arm school communities with the data they need to make specific demands of state and federal governments. It is possible that schools could use this data to improve their performances by learning from each other. It is also possible that irate parents may pressure schools to improve student outcomes. Other possibilities include the fact that some parents may vote with their feet and remove their children from what they consider under-performing schools. Were this to happen, reduced enrolments could lead to reduced funding, reduced staffing and a further decline in performance.
The Australian Education Union (AEU)has been very concerned that the My School data be used sensitively to help schools, not punitively to brand them as failures. It is for this reason that the AEU has urged the federal government to take action to prevent the construction, sale and distribution of school 'league tables' in Australia. To this point the Education Minister, Julia Gillard, while declaring 'league tables' simplistic has given no guarantee that her government will act to prohibit their production. The AEU has claimed that in the absence of such action from the government it will be instructing its members not to take part in the administration of the 2010 NAPLAN tests. It would appear that this debate is by no means over.