To examine these associations at a finer grain, with the intent of informing
educational funding policy, we subjected Australia’s 2003 PISA data set to secondary
analysis to better understand the reading and mathematics achievement of students
with varying SES, across a range of school SES groupings. Our descriptive analyses
show that increases in school SES are consistently associated with increases in
students’ academic performance, and that this relationship holds regardless of
individual students’ SES. In Australia, the socio-economic profile of the school matters
substantially in terms of academic achievement. We discuss the implications of these
findings in the context of the current discussion around federal school funding
policies, with particular attention given to the association of school composition
with student achievement.