 Ixia is an index. It expresses the level of socio-educational advantage of students in a school. And it's important to know that, because students' levels of socio-educational advantage generally affect their levels of educational achievement. They also influence other outcomes. Ixia has been set with a mean of a thousand and a standard deviation So a school with an index of twelve hundred has students who, on average, are two standard deviations above the national mean. These students come to school with a great level of advantage. A school with an index of eight hundred, or below, on the other hand, 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. Fair comparisons can be made, however, among schools with students from similar levels of socio-educational advantage. Ixia was developed to enable such fair comparisons. This graph shows the relationship between Ixia and the performance of schools on Napland. At the bottom end, at eight hundred on Ixia, at the left-hand end, the schools at that level tend to perform less well on Napland, whereas the ones at the right, up around twelve hundred, tend to do better. And the red line summarises that relationship. Of course, not all schools are on the line. Some do better than you'd expect, given the Ixia for their students. Some do less well than you'd expect. So school A, for example, is a school doing less well than you'd expect, even given the relatively low level of its students' index. And school B is a school that does much better than you'd expect, even given the advantage level of its students. Now, in some countries, analyses are done that suggest school B is a school from which school A could learn. And I think that's nonsense. School A would say, how could I learn from school B? Its context is so different. Its students are so much more privileged than mine. But school A could learn from schools with students of a similar background. And this is precisely what my school is for. School A could learn, for example, from school C. A school with students with exactly the same level of the index of socio-educational advantage, but performing very much better. Ixia is calculated using information on parents' education and occupation, as well as other demographic data, such as the proportion of students in the school who are Indigenous and the extent of geographic remoteness of the school. The Commonwealth Government requires all schools to collect this information, and that's what we use at Akara. Now, over time, we've improved our data collection, but we've also improved the method for computing the index. We now have good measures for the index at the individual student level, and so we can provide not only a stable estimate of a school's average index, but also a good picture of the distribution of students indices around their school's average. Having a strong and valid measure of socio-educational advantage for schools enables us to identify for each school others with which fair comparisons of students' literacy and numeracy levels can be made. These comparisons reveal marked differences among the schools in the level of their students' literacy and numeracy. The high performers in these comparisons show the others that they should raise their aspirations for their students. From those with lower levels of student achievement, it also removes the opportunity to declare that they could not be expected to do better given the students with which they work, because other schools with similar students are doing so much better. The comparisons invite all schools to work, to weaken the influence of socio-educational background on students' educational achievements, and we know that can be done. We know from comparisons provided by 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 achievements than they are in Australia. The educational systems in those countries are high quality and high equity. Ours is high quality, but lower in equity. We should aspire to match the high quality and high equity countries, and we should see ourselves moving in that direction. Before we see it happening at the national level, however, we'll see it happening at the school level, because that is where the work is done, and we'll see it in the MySchool website.