School rankings don’t teach us much … unless you include this key variable

May 21, 2026 — 7:30pm

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School rankings may feel like a simple guide for parents, but the numbers often reveal more about the families inside a school than about its quality – and they measure nothing beyond literacy and numeracy.

I take my children to scouts and volunteer as a leader because, as a child, it taught me skills that were genuinely useful in adulthood: teamwork, problem-solving, resilience and love for the environment. But where we live, extracurricular activities go quiet whenever an exam for an opportunity class, selective school or NAPLAN comes around.

A significant number of children attend coaching colleges, a format that was banned in China in 2021 in an effort to ease pressure on students and parents.

Still, parents in Australia who prioritise academic results and can pay for coaching, or can afford to move to catchment areas with higher-ranked schools, will naturally do so.

If academic results are the most important thing in a child’s education, then following school rankings makes sense. But it is worth unpacking which rankings to look at, and what they actually tell us.

I strongly encourage parents to start at the MySchool website and compare schools of interest rather than a newspaper league table. The website offers a more nuanced and reliable picture. The rankings you see otherwise often rely on raw NAPLAN scores and that masks their........

© The Age