STUDENTS at schools in the north of the region are more likely to come from wealthy homes than those along the coast. Children enrolled at The Hamilton and Alexandra, Baimbridge and Derrinallum colleges are twice as likely to come from privileged backgrounds than most other south-west schools.The three secondary schools had more than half of their student cohort hail from the highest socio-economic pool of students, according to data released of the Federal Government's My School website.Meanwhile, the majority of students from Heywood and District, Camperdown and Terang colleges fell into the lowest socio-economic bracket under the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA).The index was devised to better measure the NAPLAN test results of school students in relation to the income and educational level of their parents which plays a contributing role in their child's schooling.Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals president Brian Burgess said the ICSEA was not a true reflection of the socio-economic status of a school in regional areas especially, given students travelled by bus from districts as far as 50 kilometres away to attend class."The ICSEA is relatively crude in its construction and I would hope the public do not take its results as gospel," he said."Principals across the state have a lot of concern about it as an indicator because you have students that attending school that live quite some distance away from the campus."That is even more the case in country areas where you have a lot of country kids coming into the city and being assessed as being in the same socio-economic category as those living in the suburbs."Mr Burgess said the State Government's student-family occupations index was a far better indicator of a school's socio-economic standing."Take for instance farmers and landholders, who would make up a significant proportion of parents at many schools in the Western District," he said. "A lot of those farmers would be asset-rich, cash-poor and would therefore be classified as being in a lower socio-economic category even though they may have a university education."The ICSEA was drawn up by the Schools Reporting Working Group comprising senior officials from the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, State and Federal Education Department officials and private school representatives.The scoring was a combination of a number of social and economic factors, including the percentage of parents with an income between $13,000 and $21,000, regional unemployment levels and the percentage of adults whose highest level of schooling is year 11 or lower.
Wealth and education: Website stats an 'unreliable guide'
