Wagga's average household income increased from $1240 to $1680 between 2008 and 2017 but its NAPLAN scores spent most of the past few years recovering from sharp decline that started in 2011.

UNSW Gonski Institute for Education director Professor Adrian Piccoli said Wagga's scores did compare well with the 10 largest regional centres in NSW.

"When you look at that, Wagga doesn't do too badly by comparison in the sense that it's got higher average household income - the only one higher is Maitland - and it's got higher NAPLAN scores than places like Nowra and Tamworth and Albury," he said.

Professor Piccoli said it was not fair to compare Wagga with smaller locations in the the Riverina as smaller numbers of students produced "volatility" in the results.

The university's Gonski Data Lab project tracked primary and secondary school student scores from the NAPLAN national standardised tests for dozens of cities and towns across NSW.

The NAPLAN tests students' reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation and numeracy in during the three, five, seven and nine year levels.

The results were compared with socioeconomic indicators in each location that are thought to influence a child's performance at school, such as household incomes, English proficiency and unemployment rates.

Wagga Achieve Tutoring director Tamara Jones-Hood said the UNSW project suggested there was a link between academic performance and where students lived.

"There is a substantial gap between metropolitan students and students in rural, remote and regional areas," she said.

"While the data looks to be trending upwards, our kids are making improvements in their literacy and numeracy achievement and that's great and we want that to continue happening, we still have this divide between regional areas and our metropolitan cousins."

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Dr Jones-Hood said the data did not cover the pandemic period, which saw a trend of people moving out of capital cities in favour of regional areas.

"Schools also had to skip NAPLAN last year. I think when that data comes out we will see a changing demographic and I think what it also highlights is that parents want to be really involved in their children's education.

"When you control for socioeconomic status, parental engagement is one of the biggest drivers of academic success and we saw parents being really engaged in their children's education when they were having to learn from home.

"I think parents now have a better idea of what a teacher's job is and what's going on in the classroom, so I think if we can capitalise on that we can see continuous improvement."

Professor Piccoli said Wagga's data suggested there was something holding back the students' average performance, but he did not think it was unemployment or difficulty in recruiting teachers to the city.

"In terms of large regional centres, Wagga does OK. The bigger picture is how those 10 largest regional centres compared to most of the rest of NSW in the sense that their NAPLAN results over that past ten years have basically flatlined," he said.

"The concern in a lot of regional places is that even in places where household incomes are going up, the NAPLAN scores haven't increased."

Professor Piccoli said the project had not set out to find the answer to why the scores had not increased at this stage.

"The question is why are the kids in all those schools are flatlining? I don't know the answer to that, the [Gonski Data Lab] website was not designed to provide answers to do that, but it was designed to identify that there's something going on," he said.

"What it then requires is researchers and policy people to look at what's going on in a place that's rapidly growing in performance, like in Parramatta.

"What's going on in a place like Paramatta that isn't happening in Wagga? What is making a difference?"