ACARA
ACARA Websites - Feedback Wanted!
ACARA is embarking on an organisation-wide project to redesign its website portfolio, which has a combined audience of over five million visitors a year. The aim of this project is to make sure you can easily access information on ACARA’s work and improve your website experience. To make sure their new websites are designed around you, they need to gather your insights on the usability and opportunities for improvement of their websites, and would appreciate if you took the time to complete some surveys on their various websites:
- Please complete the ACARA/NAP website survey.
- Please complete the My School website survey.
- Please complete the Australian Curriculum website survey.
Your time and feedback through these surveys is greatly appreciated.
National Report on Schooling 2018 Released
The National Report on Schooling in Australia for 2018 has been released. ACARA produces this report on behalf of the COAG Education Council.
The 2018 report includes a summary of nationally agreed policy initiatives and a report on national key performance measures. A dashboard represents any statistically significant changes in key performance measures.
Data reported for 2018 include that:
- The national school enrolment rate for the six–fifteen-year-old population was 99.7%.
- The average national attendance rate for all students (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) in Years 1 to 10 was 91.9%. Average attendance rates were higher for Years 1 to 6 than for Years 7 to 10.
- At 82.3%, the average attendance rate for Indigenous students was 10.2 percentage points lower than for non-Indigenous students (92.5 per cent). This gap increased by 0.4 percentage points from 2017.
- Three quarters (75.2%) of all Australian students in Years 1 to 10 attended school for at least 90% of school days. However, less than half (48.7%) of Indigenous students within this group met the 90% benchmark.
- NAPLAN participation rates were over 90% for reading and writing for each of Years 3, 5, 7, and 9, and for numeracy for Years 3, 5 and 7. Year 9 participation rates were lower than for other years across all domains.
ACARA’s online data portal was also recently updated with the latest 2018 and 2019 data available. Information updated on the data portal in April 2020 includes the latest available data for:
- key performance measures for schooling
- school numbers, student numbers, and staff numbers
- student–teacher ratios
- student enrolment and retention rates
- school funding
- school students with disability
- NAP Sample – Science Literacy
- teacher education.