New version of My School released - Australia

New features in this release of My School include:

• an easy-to-use profile page with key facts and figures;
• financial information for each school;
• an indication of students' literacy and numeracy achievement as they progress through school; and
• students' NAPLAN performance over a number of years.

The My School website has two main purposes.

Firstly, it provides parents and students with information on each school – its view of itself and its mission, its staffing, its resources and its students’ characteristics and their performances.

Secondly, it provides schools and their communities with comparisons of their students’ performances in literacy and numeracy with those of students in other schools, most importantly those in schools that serve similar students. These comparisons provide information to support improvements in schools. Among schools with similar students, those achieving higher student performances can stimulate others to lift expectations of what they and their students can achieve. The schools with higher performing students can be a source of information for others on the policies and practices that produce those higher performances.

My School enables you to search the profiles of almost 10,000 Australian schools. My School is an Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) information service. ACARA is an independent authority with functions including the publishing of nationally comparable data on all Australian schools.

Key changes that have been made to the website in 2011 include:

• Providing an easy-to-use summary page with key facts and figures, including an expanded commentary on the school context, information about students from language backgrounds other than English, and more nationally comparable senior secondary outcomes information
• Reporting financial information for each school, including recurrent income and capital expenditure broken down by funding source
• Enhancing depictions of NAPLAN results, including a new depiction of students’ literacy and numeracy improvement as they progress through school.

Interestingly the search for specific schools is protected by a Captcha and "accept conditions" button. I can't help wondering why?
Is it a literacy test or an information literacy test?
I can't see any place where I can insert any spam (should I want to)

All sorts of interesting info available though, including lots of graphs, how many students it caters for, and financial information showing how much the school budget is, and recurrent income per student.

However one not so good sign - the site froze temporarily during my exploration. - heavy load?

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