In a leafy Canberra suburb, a father opens the My School website before deciding where to send his daughter for Year 7. Canberra's reputation precedes the search: the Australian Capital Territory is the nation's best-educated jurisdiction, home to the country's highest concentration of degree-qualified parents, and its schools post the highest average NAPLAN scores of any state or territory, year after year. What stops him is a second tool further down the page — the one that measures a school against its "statistically similar" peers elsewhere in Australia, matched for the same socio-educational profile. His local public high school, in one of Canberra's more advantaged catchments, sits not above that comparison group but within it, or below it. The averages that make the ACT look like the best schooling system in the country are true. They are also, on the government's own published data, not the whole story.
What the government did
The Barr Labor–Greens government, in office since 2001 across three Chief Ministers and two decades of continuous control over the education portfolio, has built its record on the argument that resourcing drives results. The ACT was among the first Australian jurisdictions to commit its public schools to full funding against the Gonski-era Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) — the benchmark of what a school needs to teach its actual mix of students — years ahead of the 2034 deadline other states and territories signed up to under the 2025 Better and Fairer Schools Agreement (approx.; ACT public schools were already funded at or near 100 per cent of SRS in recent ACT Budget Papers, against a national schedule stretching to the mid-2030s). Successive ACT budgets have backed that head start with the country's highest recurrent government spending per public-school student, new primary and high schools built to serve fast-growing suburbs such as Molonglo Valley and Whitlam, and system-wide literacy and numeracy strategies rolled out through the Education Directorate's reform agenda since 2018. The government's pitch to voters has been consistent for most of two decades: a well-funded, well-staffed public system, in the country's most highly educated city, should produce the country's best results — and on the raw NAPLAN averages the Directorate publishes each year, it does.
The strongest case
The numbers a government would want to run on
On the measures the ACT government reports first, the record is genuinely strong, and part of it reflects real policy choices rather than Canberra's demographic luck alone. The ACT has recorded the highest or equal-highest jurisdiction average across most NAPLAN reading, writing and numeracy domains for over a decade, a consistent pattern through ACARA's National Reports on the NAPLAN program from the mid-2010s to the most recent published results (approx.). Its public schools already meet or exceed the 100 per cent SRS funding standard other jurisdictions are not required to reach until the mid-2030s — a genuine first-mover commitment the Barr government made without being forced to by a Commonwealth deadline. Recurrent government spending per public-school student is the highest of any Australian jurisdiction, consistently, across recent editions of the Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services (approx.). And some of the advantage was inherited, not manufactured: Canberra's occupational mix — a public service, university and diplomatic workforce concentrated in one city — hands any ACT government, of any political colour, one of the most educationally advantaged school intakes in the country before a single policy is written. On the headline numbers, the government has a fair claim that it has not wasted that starting position: it spends the most, it met its funding target years early, and it posts the best raw averages in the nation.
The evidence
The complication sits in a second data set the government publishes but does not lead with. ICSEA — the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage that the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) calculates for every Australian school from parental occupation, parental education and school location — measures exactly the kind of advantage Canberra has in abundance. The ACT's average ICSEA sits around 1,100 (approx.), against a national benchmark of 1,000, the highest average of any state or territory by a clear margin. That matters because ICSEA is the same measure ACARA uses to build the "statistically similar schools" comparison published on the My School website, a tool designed to answer not "which school scored highest" but "which school did better or worse than schools serving a similarly advantaged intake elsewhere in Australia." On that comparison, a share of ACT public schools sit within or below the range of their statistically similar peers rather than above it (approx., based on My School's published school-level comparison data) — an outcome a jurisdiction with the country's most advantaged public-school intake would not be expected to produce if advantage were converting into results at the same rate it does in less-advantaged states.
The same pattern holds on growth, not just on a point-in-time score. ACARA's NAPLAN data tracks not only where a cohort sits in Year 3, 5, 7 and 9, but how much ground individual students gain between tests — a growth measure that, unlike a raw average, is not simply a function of how advantaged a system's intake already is. On that growth measure, the ACT has not consistently ranked at or near the top of the eight jurisdictions the way its raw averages would suggest (approx., a pattern noted across recent ACARA National Reports and independent commentary, though NAPLAN's 2023 shift to a new proficiency-standard scale limits clean year-on-year comparison before and after that date). Spending is not the constraint on that growth: the Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services has for years shown ACT government schools with the highest recurrent expenditure per student of any jurisdiction (approx.), which sharpens rather than answers the question of why the highest-resourced, highest-advantage system in the country is not also the most improved.
The critique
None of this is a rounding error the government can wave away as noise in a small jurisdiction's data, or an artefact of one unusual cohort. ICSEA-adjusted analysis of My School data — the kind independent researchers such as the Grattan Institute have applied across every Australian jurisdiction — is designed precisely to strip out the advantage a system starts with and isolate what it does with that advantage. Applied to the ACT, that is what produces the uncomfortable finding sitting under the comfortable headline: a jurisdiction that tops the country on raw NAPLAN averages does not top the country, and on some readings sits closer to the middle of the pack (approx.), once its advantage is accounted for. That is a narrower and more specific claim than saying ACT schools are bad — every other jurisdiction would take the ACT's absolute results without hesitation. The claim is about a government that has spent two decades campaigning on its education record: given the intake it has, the funding it commits, and twenty years of continuous Labor–Greens control over the portfolio, the ACT should be the hardest jurisdiction in the country to out-perform on a level playing field. On the advantage-adjusted evidence, it is not.
The public-private divide
Averaging Canberra's results together also hides a split the government's own enrolment data confirms. Around two in five ACT students attend a non-government school (approx.), one of the highest non-government shares of any state or territory, and that share climbs further in the senior secondary years, when many families who kept their children in the public system through Year 10 move them into an independent or Catholic college for Years 11 and 12 (approx., a well-documented pattern in the ACT's distinct college system, where senior secondary is delivered through separate colleges rather than through the high school itself). That pattern does two things at once. It draws a portion of the most engaged, best-resourced families out of the public system at exactly the point the ACT's own ICSEA data shows advantage becoming less evenly distributed within it — some Canberra public high schools, particularly in newer and lower-income suburbs in the Territory's south and west, carry an ICSEA well below the ACT average even though the jurisdiction-wide average is the nation's highest. And it means the single "ACT" NAPLAN figure the government publishes blends an established-suburb public system that performs strongly with a private sector drawing on much of the same advantaged intake, making it harder to see which sector, and which suburb, is actually converting Canberra's advantage into results.
Two structural pressures sit underneath that split. The first is growth: the ACT's fastest-growing suburbs, in Molonglo Valley, Whitlam and the Territory's southern growth corridor, have added students faster than some new schools could open, producing composite classes and demountable classrooms concentrated in the same lower-ICSEA catchments — the opposite of where a government trying to close an equity gap would want capacity strain to land. The second is workforce. The ACT's teaching workforce, like every jurisdiction's, has faced relief-teacher shortages and retention pressure through the 2020s, and a pay-and-conditions dispute between the ACT government and the Australian Education Union's ACT branch in the early 2020s (approx.) — resolved only after industrial action and a revised offer — exposed a public system struggling to hold its own workforce inside the country's most expensive capital city, even while it outspends every other jurisdiction on a per-student basis. Neither pressure shows up in a single year's NAPLAN average. Both show up in the growth data and the similar-schools comparison the government does not lead with.
The ACT is not failing at education. It is failing to convert its extraordinary advantage into an extraordinary result — and that gap is a policy choice, not a law of nature.
The risk to the future
An advantage the next generation may not inherit evenly
If the gap between the ACT's average results and its advantage-adjusted results is left under a headline that reports only the average, three things compound. First, the enrolment pattern the data already shows — families with the means to choose exiting the public system, disproportionately at the senior-secondary transition — is likely to continue, concentrating disadvantage in the public schools least equipped to absorb it, in the same growth suburbs already running composite classes. Second, the ACT is entering a tighter budget period: the ACT Auditor-General's financial audits and the Territory's own budget papers have flagged a structural deficit across the forward estimates, and a jurisdiction that already spends the most per student in the country, for results that do not yet clearly outperform its advantage, will find it harder to argue for further real increases to that spending without first explaining the gap. Third, and most directly, every year the equity gap goes unnamed and untracked in public reporting is a year of schooling a child in a lower-ICSEA Canberra suburb does not get back — NAPLAN measures a point in a trajectory, and a system whose overall average holds steady while the gap between its most and least advantaged schools does not close is not standing still; it is carrying the same inequality forward into the workforce Canberra will need in a decade. Canberra's advantage is real. Whether the next generation of ACT students inherits it evenly, rather than by postcode and school sector, is the test the average score does not answer.