 What is IXIA? IXIA is an index that expresses the level of socio-educational advantage of students in a school. Students' level of socio-educational advantage generally affect their levels of educational achievement. It also influences other outcomes. IXIA is calculated using information on parents' education and occupation. It also takes into account other data such as the proportion of students who are Indigenous and the extent of the school's geographic remoteness. The Commonwealth Government requires all schools to collect this information and this information is then used by IXIA. IXIA has been set with a mean of 1,000 and a standard deviation of 100. A school with an index of 1,200 has students who, on average, are two standard deviations above the national mean level of socio-educational advantage. On average, these students come to school with a great level of advantage. A school with an index of 800 or below, however, works with students with considerable socio-educational disadvantage. It would be very unfair to compare the performances of such schools since the socio-educational backgrounds of their students are so different. But fair comparisons can be made among schools with students from similar levels of socio-educational advantage. IXIA was developed to enable such fair comparisons. Over time, we have improved our data collection. We have also improved the method for computing the index. We now have good measures for the index at the individual student level so we can provide a stable estimate of a school's average index as well as a good picture of the distribution of students' indices around their school's average. Having a strong and valid measure of socio-educational advantage enables us to identify schools with which fair comparison of students' literacy and numeracy levels can be made. These comparisons reveal marked differences in students' level of literacy and numeracy among schools working with students from similar levels of socio-educational advantage. The high performers in these comparisons show the others that they should raise their aspirations for their students. The comparisons invite all schools to work to weaken the influence of socio-educational background on students' educational achievements. We know from comparisons provided by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment that in high performing countries such as Canada, Finland, Japan and South Korea differences in students' levels of socio-educational advantage are less strongly related to differences in their educational achievement than in Australia. Their educational systems are high quality and high equity. Ours are high quality but lower equity and we should be aspiring to match these countries. We hope you find the MySchool website to be valuable and easy to use. Please send us any feedback to info at akara.edu.au