Gonski Data Lab

An initiative of the UNSW Gonski Institute for Education and the Economics of Education Knowledge Hub @UNSWBusiness

The purpose of this interactive website is to allow users to visually explore relationships and trends between selected outside the school gate factors and the educational performance of students from individual communities. The site uses publicly available data* to compare communities, not schools, in order to better understand how whole of community, outside the school gate influences impact student performance.

Researchers and policy makers are deeply interested in understanding what influences student performance and in what context. While student performance is influenced by what happens inside schools it is also heavily influenced by what happens outside the school gate including by the community within which students live, where their community is located, and by their parents and carers.

The purpose of this tool is not to make causal inferences from these relationships and trends but rather to reframe the question about what influences student performance in different communities and to prompt further investigation of those influences.