MySchool 2.0 website to give parents better information about their child's education

PARENTS will be able to track the performance of their child's school and discover how much is spent on each student under major changes to the MySchool website.

Myschools Website Revamped

Important changes announced to the My School Website.

A revamped version of the popular, but controversial, website is set to go live next month with a "world first" amount of information for parents, teachers and governments.

The website will have new security measures to stop the production of school league tables and feature new graphics to make it easier to interpret and compare national testing scores from 2008 and 2010.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said one of the most significant additions will be details of school financing, allowing parents to see how much money comes from each level of government as well as from parent contributions.

Ms Gillard said she expected the disclosure would lead to parents seeking out "conversations" with state and federal governments in the lead-up to a landmark review of federal school funding.

"You should go down and talk to the principal, you should go down and talk in the various consulting forums that schools have about what this means for your school, and what's going to happen next," she said.

Private schools will only be able to keep secret the details of any trusts not controlled by the school itself.

Queensland Independent Schools executive director David Robertson said some private schools are still being called about their financial data just two-and-a-half weeks before the site was set to go live.

"The current exercise I would have to describe as being a shambles. We would very much question the quality of the data," Mr Robertson said.

Test results from only those students present at the school for the tests will be uploaded allowing users to make a true comparison of how the students have improved over time.

However, chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, Barry McGraw, said any "unreliable" test results tainted by proven cheating allegations would be removed.

The controversial measure used to group socio-econom-ically similar schools has been amended after an outcry from several schools and the Government says it will lead to more meaningful comparisons of student performance.

However, APPA and the Independent Education Union of Australia expressed unhappiness that the Government had not accepted their recommendation to take more focus off the NAPLAN scores.