The school doesn't voluntarily release its results for obvious reasons, and the government only forces the top 150 schools to make it public, so how ive come to these numbers is by looking at the 2014 data (the last year we had all schools ranked), and seeing what the success rates (which are public record for all schools even up to 2023) correspond to in terms of ranks, and this is actually quite consistent for the top 150 schools, so its a pretty solid tool to find the ballpark range of your schools rank. Our school 2022 had a success rate of 1.27% (median across nsw is about 5.5%), which puts it somewhere from rank 500-550, and it went up to 3.11% iirc (same median) in my year, which is around rank 360-ish? so fairly big jump (makes sense considering we tripled the previous years band 6s).
School suffers both from poor teaching quality and from poor administration. Stupid decisions are made by people who do not know what they are talking about that drastically reduce the odds that any kid can get a band 6; they do trials a term early "to benefit major work students", of which there are very few, which results in teachers being unable to utilise the Independent trial papers the school pays for as they are sent out after trials are long finished. This results in students either doing a previous years trial paper (prone to cheating as its not that hard to find independent papers from previous years) or doing one written by teachers, who of course have limited skill in exam writing hsc style questions (for instance, my chemistry paper was written as a 2hr exam, but we had 3 hours to complete it, and it had an incorrect question, which the teacher had to remove after it was pointed out). Inadequate trials means students are not ready nor prepared for their HSC. Other stupid decisions, like greatly limiting a students ability to drop to 10 units, and an unwillingness to send out n awards for students who do not complete class work means that very difficult classes like chemistry and physics are filled with people who do not want to be there and make it everyone else's problem. I believe 95% of students do not receive their uni entrance through an atar pathway but rather through early entry, so in the eyes of the school theyve done a great job as all the kids are going to uni. The biggest factor that bothers me though, is we do not live in a low socio-economic environment and these sorts of problems are purely artificial.