In contrast, the Eastern Riverina Chronicle’s sister publication The Sydney Morning Herald said, “Today, the door has been opened to knowledge until now kept in the domain of bureaucrats and politicians.”

The Australian Government’s goal is to improve the education of Australian children.

“It will provide parents and the community with accurate information allowing them to be their own judge,” Federal Minister for Education Julia Gillard said.

“It will certainly enable us to compare similar schools and it certainly enables us to know where the most disadvantaged schools are,” Ms Gillard said.

My School uses data from the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) which all students do in years three, five, seven and nine.

Parents logging on to the web site can clearly see their school’s scores in reading, writing, spelling, punctuation, grammar and numeracy.

Colours are used to highlight scores above or below other schools of similar socio-economic backgrounds and all schools.

Holbrook Public School principal Jason Weaven questions the accusation of lack of transparency relating to NAPLAN scores in schools.

“Parents are informed about the NAPLAN assessments in the annual school report,” he said.

A series of graphs show the percentages of children in bands relating to school averages and state averages.

Mr Weaven pointed out that staff analyse the NAPLAN results and then put in place programs and teacher professional development to improve the results.

A big criticism of the NAPLAN results is that the scores are only a collective snapshot and the ranking does not measure the progress made by individual students.

“Our focus is catering for the individual needs of the students at their level,” Mr Weaven explained.

“Programs such as Reading Recovery, Accelerated Literacy, Count Me In Too and Gifted and Talented programs are put in place in the School Plan to progress individual needs,” he said.