A roughly equal number of year six students in urban schools and non-urban schools had their performance analysed in the PILNA 2021 reading assessment: 52% in urban schools and 48% in non-urban schools.

Figure CRF6.7 shows the average reading performance of year six students by school locality. Year six students in urban schools scored slightly higher than those in non-urban schools. This was similar to PILNA 2018 and PILNA 2015, when students in urban schools performed better than those in non-urban schools (Figure CRF6.8). Further statistical testing needs to be done to understand if these differences are significant or the result of chance or outliers.