ICSEA: what the school score means

ICSEA is ACARA's scale of the educational advantage that a school's students bring from home. It combines parents' occupations and education with the school's remoteness and its share of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. ACARA sets the scale at a median of 1,000 and a standard deviation of 100.

School values typically range from about 500, for students from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds, to about 1,300 for extremely advantaged ones (ACARA, Guide to understanding ICSEA, 2024). ICSEA describes a school's students, not its teaching. My School uses it to compare a school's NAPLAN results with schools whose students have similar backgrounds.

To check a school, open its profile from school search. Each profile shows the school's ICSEA and its rank in its state and among schools within 5 km.

Of the 9,623 schools with a published ICSEA, 73.6% score between 900 and 1,099, within about one standard deviation of 1,000. A further 11.0% are below 900 and 15.4% are at 1,100 or more.

ICSEA by state: the ACT's median school sits at 1,085 and the NT's at 754, against 1,006 nationally.

Independent schools have the highest median ICSEA in Australia (1,066), followed by Catholic schools (1,046) and government schools (982). Government schools have the lowest median of the three sectors in every state and territory. By state, ACT has the highest median (1,085) and NT the lowest (754).

Method: medians of published school ICSEA values, grouped by state and unweighted by enrolment. Source: ACARA School Profile 2025.

Which sectors run the schools at 1,100 or more

Half of Australia's most advantaged schools are government schools: 746 of the 1,486 schools with an ICSEA of 1,100 or more (50.2%). ICSEA describes students' socio-educational background, not school quality.

Method: count schools with published ICSEA of at least 1,100 by sector and divide by all schools in that subset. Source: ACARA School Profile 2025.

Of the 1,486 schools with an ICSEA of 1,100 or more, 746 (50.2%) are government schools, 405 (27.3%) independent and 335 (22.5%) Catholic. Government schools make up 69.5% of all schools with a published ICSEA, so their share at 1,100 or more is lower than their share overall.

Primary, secondary and combined schools

Combined schools have the highest median ICSEA (1,014) and secondary schools the lowest (994).

Sydney Grammar School in NSW has the highest ICSEA in Australia at 1,274. 8 of the 20 highest are government schools, most of them academically selective. A high ICSEA reflects who attends a school, not how well it teaches.

Highest ICSEA by state

Method: medians, counts, shares and rankings calculated by GDP.com.au from ACARA School Profile 2025 (11,039 school records, 9,623 with a published ICSEA). Medians, shares and rankings include only schools with a published value. Definitions: ACARA Guide to understanding ICSEA (2024) and ICSEA 2025 Technical Report.