During the last decades the improvement of school effectiveness is emerging objective of education reform strategies around the world. Increasing emphasis on academic performance gives new importance to investigating factors that contribute to student achieving .While there is a wide literature about complexity of quality and effectiveness of education, the most prevalent analytical approach measure quality of schools on the base of students’ performance or test results. Previous analyses show that student achievement is determined both by individual characteristics and the school resources (including the quantity and quality of teachers) and also the efficiency with which those resources are used. Researches on students’ outcomes reveal that student performance is most influenced by family background around the word, at the same time the extent of this effect can vary among countries, among schools and over times. Past decade researches increasingly focuses on the school-level and system-level factors that can modify effect of family background on students’ educational outcomes.

Earlier researches reveal that easily-measured school characteristics such as schools facilities, class size or teaching hours have only modest effect on student performance. Equal access to education seems to have the greatest system-level impact on student performance, while teachers’ quality and classroom practice seem to be the most important factors of school-level impact on it. Although generally teachers act individually (alone, in the classroom), pedagogical work is considered not individual but collective action. Beyond individual qualities, motivation, ambition, commitment and experience of teachers, quality of teaching greatly affected by the support of professional community, school leadership and school climate. recent analyses emphasized that collective capacity building - shifting teachers from their isolated classroom practice to creating a collaborative culture based on interdependence, shared responsibility, and mutual accountability – seems to be one of the most important factor of school effectiveness.

 Previous researches reveals two possible mechanism considering similar or different mechanism of school-effect on disadvantageous and advantageous students’ learning outcomes. “Cumulative effects model” suggest that effect of school on students’ outcome independent from pupils’ family background. Conversely, “protective model” propose that effect of school depends on the circumstances of individual students: students who have less advantageous family background can benefit more from good school than their luckier schoolmates – but maybe the negative effect of “bad” schools can also be stronger on less advantageous students’ performance than on the others.

Our present analysis based on individual-level linked data of National Assessment of Basic Competencies, Hungary, aims to contribute to the debate on  “cumulative effects model” and “protective model” with some empirical evidence. While our analysis is based on data of a single country, the added value of national-level data construction allows us to conduct deeper analysis focusing on a more universal research question concerning the general mechanism of effect of school on student learning outcomes. Our basic research question is whether school-level determinants of students’ learning outcomes depend on the social-economic background of the pupils or does it the same for all?

 Our main hypothesis is that less advantageous students’ achievement is effected stronger by the school than more advantageous ones, so quality of school is more important for the pupils who have disadvantageous family background than for their schoolmates with high social-economic background. Our additional hypothesis is that the effect of school features is stronger on individual level, time-based added values than on raw test scores.

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