The NSW Minister for Education Adrian Piccoli has urged the federal government not to abandon the state's most disadvantaged schools after a new report found that Australian society was far less equal than previously thought.

The report, commissioned by the NSW Department of Education, used 12 years of the national household, income and labour dynamics survey of 14,000 Australians.

"We aren't nearly as equal as we like to think," said the report's author Peter Siminski. "The idea of being the lucky country that is full of equal opportunity is looking less and less realistic."

Dr Siminski and co-author Silvia Mendolia from the University of Wollongong found that the ability of Australians to move beyond the socioeconomic status of their family was almost as restricted as those in the US and the UK, which have some of the lowest rates of mobility in the Western world.