This study picks up where much of the school sectors debate in Australia has stalled — at the level of NAPLAN scores — and asks a more searching question: do school climate and student engagement actually differ across government, Catholic and independent schools, and do those differences help explain the achievement gaps between sectors?
Drawing on the same LSAC dataset and Year 7 NAPLAN outcomes used in the authors’ earlier work, the study analyses 3,184 students across the three sectors. School climate is measured through three indicators: school discipline (as reported by teachers), experience of being bullied (as reported by students), and teacher self-efficacy. Student engagement covers all three dimensions: affective (sense of belonging), behavioural (teacher-rated classroom conduct), and cognitive (goal orientations using the same 2×2 mastery/performance framework as the prior study).
On the descriptive side, the patterns are clear and intuitive. Independent schools score highest on school discipline and lowest on bullying. Public school students report the highest rates of being bullied and the lowest scores on both behavioural and affective engagement, as well as lower mastery-approach orientation. Catholic schools stand out for teacher self-efficacy and higher performance-approach, performance-avoidance, and mastery-approach orientations. These patterns hold after controlling for the well-documented SES differences across sectors.
The regression modelling then examines which climate and engagement factors predict achievement within each sector. Two findings hold consistently across all three sectors and both NAPLAN domains: behavioural engagement is the single strongest predictor of academic achievement throughout, and mastery-avoidance orientation is the most consistently negative cognitive predictor. These are sector-agnostic findings — the effects are statistically uniform across public, Catholic and independent schools, which is itself a meaningful result given the different compositions of each sector.
Some sector-specific patterns also emerge. In independent schools, the experience of being bullied has a significantly stronger negative association with Reading scores than in the other two sectors — the effect remains significant even after accounting for engagement, suggesting that bullying’s impact on achievement in independent schools operates through channels beyond engagement alone. In Catholic schools, performance-approach goal orientation is uniquely and significantly associated with better Reading scores, which may partly explain why Catholic school students have performed well in previous comparative studies.
The study is careful to acknowledge its limits: the LSAC data does not allow school-level clustering, the engagement measures are cross-sectional at a single wave, and the climate constructs capture only a subset of what school climate encompasses. The authors call for future mixed-methods research to investigate why the same engagement factors produce different achievement effects in different sectoral contexts.