NAPLAN: Where to from here for students who “need additional support”?

 
Image source: MS PPT 

As the news cycle moves on from its annual NAPLAN frenzy, school systems, teachers, and most particularly parents are left wondering “What happens next?” for students in the lowest band of NAPLAN, which now has the transparent descriptor “needs additional support”. 

This is an improvement on the previous system of reporting against ten achievement bands, but there is persisting vague language about what these additional supports will look like and how they will be provided. This hazy, non-committal language is evident in this ACARA video for parents, which on the one hand refers to “clearer reporting” and “higher expectations” but does not muster any urgency when describing next-steps in relation to struggling students – “Parents and carers may wish to discuss their child’s progress with their teacher”. References (also vague and very general) are made to "support", but with no clarity or accountability around who will provide this, how it will be selected, and how progress will be tracked against said support (waiting another two years for the next NAPLAN cycle is not an acceptable option). Hope is also not a strategy. 

What parents do not need, is false reassurances and rationalisations that they really needn’t worry about their child’s low literacy skills. “It’s just one test” parents are told. “The tests are not very precise” they are reassured (ironically, their child’s skills may be lower than indicated by NAPLAN). “The tests were completed online” – so apparently some younger students may have struggled for IT-related reasons. “Teachers will …already be providing support in their classrooms” - in which case, they are clearly not very effective for a large proportioin of students. These are all platitudes and excuses. And perhaps most perniciously of all, responsibility for improvement is subtlely shifted to the child who is cheered on to have self-belief: “I can progress, I can improve”. Of course, all children can progress and improve, but they need strategic support from adults in order to do so. It is not the responsibility of children to “do better”.

Let’s be very clear. Fewer than 20% of students who are behind in literacy by Year 3 will catch up. Let that sink in for a moment.  If we assume that approximately 313,000 Year 3 students sat NAPLAN this year calculated as 96% of the roughly 325,000 students enrolled in Year 3), and approximately 10% scored in “needs additional support” band, this means we’re talking about some 31,300 students nationally needing intensive support, but fewer than 6,260 of these students will actually catch up. Think about the compounding effects as the remaining more than 25,000 move up the year levels and into secondary school. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, as the Matthew Effect remind us.

It is pleasing in this landscape, to see more and more education systems, including my own in Victoria, Australia, adopting Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) and its core element, Response to Intervention (RTI) as pedagogical frameworks.

RTI comes to education directly from public health, where its three tiers represent universal, targeted and specific prevention of learning difficulties. For some, the word “intervention” initially seems odd, but it is a reminder that classroom teaching is, in itself, a form of intervention in children’s lives.

As can be seen in the figure below, the RTI framework sees reading difficulties prevented for some 80% of students through the primary prevention platform of high-quality classroom instruction for all. 

 Image source

This requires that instruction is not an eclectic mish-mash of balanced literacy approaches, but instead, comprises structured explicit literacy teaching. If you’re not sure about the distinction between balanced literacy and structured explicit literacy instruction, you can read an open access explainer here.

With high-quality progress-monitoring tools in play, students who are falling behind are identified in a timely manner and provided targeted (Tier 2) small-group work that provides an increased dose (not something different) of what they are already exposed to at Tier 1. The increased dose means additional exposures and opportunities for practice. This should ensure that most of this 15% of students catch up to the rest of the class and can keep up with the curriculum. There are many high-quality, evidence-aligned intervention options that schools can access, e.g. here, here, and here.

Continuing with those high-quality monitoring tools, a smaller proportion (around 5%) will be identified as needing more intensive support, often at a 1:1 level, ideally working with a qualified tutor or allied health professional. Sometimes these students have a diagnosed form of neurodiversity, but not always. Our assumption though, should be success for 95% of students, not the 60-70% that is currently being achieved.

So – where to for schools with students whose NAPLAN data flags them as needing additional support?

Such schools face two related, but different challenges:

1.      They need to provide targeted support, without delay, based on high-quality assessment tools, to students whose skills are so far behind that they cannot possibly be keeping up across the curriculum. This support needs to be highly organised, delivered by knowledgeable staff, and sustained over a long period of time to ensure that genuine catch-up occurs. We’re not looking for false dawns.

2.      They need to review their mainstream classroom instruction so that they are not producing instructional casualties – children who could be successful readers but are not, because they have not been exposed to high-quality instruction and support.

US science of learning powerhouse, Dr Anita Archer has stated on many occasions that schools cannot intervene their way out of a Tier 1 problem. If they try to do so, they end up with data that aggregates in the way that Bill and Christie-Lee’s “RTI House” depicts (below). Sadly, this probably represents our national data, as at 2025.

 

Schools that are showing a demonstrable uplift in their academic data (pleasingly there's growing numbers of these) are doing so by moving away from discovery-based learning to explicit teaching. I defy anyone to show me a school that has abandoned explicit teaching in favour of balanced literacy and its bedfellows and shown a significant improvement in their reading and writing data. 

Those who are upstream of NAPLAN data (education academics and policy makers) need to be part of the solution, by ending the excuses and blame-shifting and showing moral courage and commitment to meaningful and translational change in every classroom - not just the ones where a lucky golden ticket happens to have landed. 

It would be awful if we didn't know what to do about this predicament. But it is worse that we DO know what to do, and wilfully choose not to take action at scale.  

If 30% of the planes manufactured by Boeing reliably fell out of the sky, with regular and predictable mass casualties, the outcry by government, media, and the public would be deafening. 

Why do we not care in the same way about children's educations?

(C) Pamela Snow (2025) 

NAPLAN – safety net or tangled net?

 

Image source: MS Powerpoint 

Today we’re seeing the annual NAPLAN reporting flurry in our print and electronic media and social media platforms are abuzz as well.

The short story on NAPLAN is that it shows a persisting pattern of under-achievement in literacy and numeracy by about a third of Australian students. To put this into real terms 132,857 of the 1.3 million children in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 not keeping up with basic clasroom learning. If you don’t master the basics (i.e., build strong learning foundations), then everything that follows will be shaky, and students will fall further and further behind their on-track peers. Learning becomes more difficult and not surprisingly, less inviting and engaging.

Falling behind academically comes at an enormous cost in terms of psychosocial wellbeing, with struggling students often developing both internalising (anxiety and depression) and externalising (attentional and behaviour) difficulties. The burdens associated with these gaps are disproportionately carried by students in equity groups, such as First Nations students, those from rural and regional areas, those from additional language backgrounds, and/or those who are neurodiverse. My colleagues and I have written about this burden in a recent open-access publication, noting that it persists in spite of increased education funding in recent years. Let's not forget too, that fewer than 20% of students who are behind at Year 3 actually catch up - and when they do, it reflects an enormous and resource-intensive effort on the part of many stakeholders.

Comments attributed to education academics in articles such as this one NAPLAN results again show one-third of students aren't meeting literacy and numeracy expectations amid calls for urgent change are disingenuous and need to be called out. Education academics need to be building better fences at the top of the cliff, by ensuring that new teacher graduates have the knowledge and skills needed to provide evidence-based teaching, regardless of location and level of community advantage. They should not be rationalising poor results and making this all about discomfort experienced by adults. Until this happens, schools and systems will need to continue investing in professional learning that backfills what teachers should have known at the conclusion of their degrees (for which they incurred a government debt). NAPLAN data is about children’s futures; futures that adults are too often willing to experiment with and blame-shift when things don’t go well. It’s also not OK to play with semantics around what “developing” means for under-achieving students. Yes, they may well be “developing”, but their rate of growth is demonstrably inadequate and this needs to be owned and responded to by schools and the systems of which they are a part.

NAPLAN data should say more about classroom instruction than it does about student or school postcodes. Some in education unfortunately fail to see the “own goal” of extolling the fact that socio-economic status is a strong predictor of academic success. We can all accept that it is going to be one predictor, but it should not tell as much of the story as it currently does. Strong teaching practices and high expectations help schools in lower‑SES areas to close the gap. Examples of this abound, but this needs to be occurring at scale.

NAPLAN is our national safety-net that sheds an annual light on our progress on lifting students’ literacy and numeracy skills in our continued efforts to be a more equitable, socially just, and clever country. Adults who are uncomfortable about what this light identifies will inevitably find themselves tangled in the net instead.

© Pamela Snow (2025)

Cognitive load theory doesn't matter

 

Image source: MS PowerPoint 

Before you spill your coffee, let me explain. 

There’s been much written and debated in recent years about Professor John Sweller’s cognitive load theory (CLT) and the idea that teachers need to understand barriers and enablers in shifting new knowledge from the fragile working memory space to longterm memory. For many, ensuring that new knowledge and skills set up camp in longterm memory is the definition of learning. Yes this can be debated but it’s a good working (no pun intended) premise. Exposure to new knowledge does not equate to learning. If it did, I would be far more knowledgeable today than I actually am, across a wide range of topics, as would most readers of this blog. 

Enthusiasm for CLT and its applications has been high in explicit teaching circles, where teachers see their jobs as…well…teaching. CLT is the natural companion to explicit teaching, because explicit teaching assumes that school learning is hard and waving knowledge and ideas around the room like aromatic smelling salts will not translate into longterm retention and availability for future critical and creative thinking, both of which have a premium attached to them in modern education and are included in the Australian Curriculum. 

If teachers are not teaching explicitly and are instead relying mainly on some form of student-led, discovery-based learning, they are not asking much of students’ executive functions and even less of their working memory. Recall that executive functions include our ability to focus (even, and especially when we are not intrinsically motivated to do so), to screen out irrelevant stimuli, to plan, organise, self-regulate, delay gratification, to reason and problem-solve, and think consequentially - all skills that are very much under construction in children and adolescents. Managing immature executive functions takes up an enormous part of every teacher’s day (and, by the way, it’s not irrelevant to the work of university academics either, but that’s a topic for another day). Examples include establishing students’ attention, getting them to sit still, to stop touching each other / other peoples’ belongings, to not call out unbidden, to not get up and walk around at random times, and to think about what might happen if they place a drink on the edge of a table….the list is endless. Immature executive functions mean that learning is hard - as explained by Professor Daniel Willingham in this podcast interview with Melbourne teacher, Ollie Lovell. 

It’s little wonder then, that the eyes of some teachers glaze over when CLT is discussed. Sure, some students may be engaging with discovery/project-based learning in ways that are mentally taxing for them, but many will instead be doing busy-work. Busy work happens when students are engaged in self-directed and / or group projects of variable impact and quality. They might be browsing the internet and skim-reading, designing attractive layouts and headings on hard copy, filling out work-sheets, discussing how and where to get started on a project, or making a 3-D diorama about a topic of which they have only the vaguest grasp. Versions of these approaches play out in higher education too. 

The most demanding thing some children are asked to do in class is to stay in their seat and not interrupt others or the teacher, and to “get involved” in group learning in some way. Learning, it is argued, is a social activity. Of course it can be, but the learning of biologically secondary knowledge and skills is fundamentally the grinding of mental cogs inside individual brains so that synapses are formed and specific memories are laid down for later retrieval, use, and editing, 

It is very difficult under circumstances of student-led, discovery learning for initial teaching, to know what different children in the class are actually learning. It is also difficult to know how to attribute knowledge and skills to classroom instruction when (a) not much formal instruction is happening and (b) the more advantaged students will have had prior exposures that will be of benefit to them. How then, do we attribute learning to classroom experience? How do we ensure that education can put its hand on the social justice scales to improve the trajectories of those who are starting from behind?

All of this has come into sharp focus in recent weeks with the announcement that the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) is being independently reviewed after 4 years of operation. Funded by the federal, state, and territory governments, AERO exists to distil high quality evidence and make it accessible to classroom teachers. It also partners in research, including with the team I co-lead at La Trobe University. AERO does not exist to be everyone’s perfect solution to every education question, dilemma, or tension. In an ideal world, we might have an education equivalent of the Therapeutic Goods Administration, to ensure that practices are only rolled out in classrooms after sufficient scientific scrutiny. But this is not the case, and students are not afforded the same protection as patients; nor are educators treated with the same respect as health professionals, where tightly-reined autonomy and laser-like accountability go hand-in-hand.  

Explicit teaching, underpinned by CLT has strong evidence to support it, but this has resulted in pushback from education academics who wish these things were not so. There’s a hollow ring in some academic corridors of “We want students to succeed. But NOT LIKE THAT”. This would be akin to surgeons persisting with open abdominal surgery over laparoscopic (“key-hole”) operations and then having to retrofit a rationale that sounds patient-centric, even though the reality is a personal preference for the well-learned and familiar. The court of public opinion would not find this acceptable, and nor would relevant regulatory authorities.

Part of the raison d’être for AERO is that Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs have been resistant to calls for a sharpening of their content on learning / cognitive science. Instead, they advocate for “a range of approaches”, because “all children learn differently” and “teacher autonomy should be respected”. I’ve written previously about edu-myths,  the fallacy of teacher/school autonomy, and teacher professionalism. If ITE programs had been operating in recent decades the way medical, engineering, and nursing programs (for example) do, AERO might not even have been established. Ironic, isn't it? 

There has been a decades-long pattern of fads and fashions in education, interwoven by uncritical adoption of neuro myths and culminating in choose your own adventure in classrooms. It’s little surprise then, that schools fall for pseudoscience such as Brain Gym, Learning Styles, coloured lenses, Skippy the Frog, and so on.  The bottom line? If professional educators stand for nothing, they fall for everything. My colleague Dr Caroline Bowen AM and I have a second textbook about to be published to support parents, teachers, and clinicians in an extraordinarily unregulated teaching (and therapy) marketplace. The problem of poor knowledge translation in practice is not unique to education but it is magnified in schools compared to health and other clinical settings. This is also a problem of scale, given that 98.6% of school-age children in Australia are enrolled at school, compared to the lower but unknown proportion who engage with clinical services because of learning difficulties (it is estimated that around 19.9% of students have learning difficulties in Australia, but the proportion who engage with formal services is not known). 

Evidence matters in every encounter with children, as they are not in a position to give informed consent to instruction or services that align with adults’ preferences and habits, rather than empirical evidence, notwithstanding the fact that evidence is sometimes absent, weak, or contradictory. That, however, is not a license for free-range practice. It is a trigger for engagement with established bodies of evidence using scientist-practitioner models and collaboration with communities of practice, where a shared sense of curiosity fuels a feedback cycle of incremental change and self-review.

Change where it is occurring has been led from the ground up, with individual teachers doing their own research and locating evidence about more optimal ways of teaching. Ironically, in doing so, they are displaying the “twenty-first century critical thinking skills” that many in education advocate - albeit often uncritically - until of course they are applied with exacitude and precision by practising teachers to ITE lore. 

This was all brought home to me a little while ago when a teacher approached me after a conference presentation. He said that for a long time, he had no idea why fellow teachers were so interested in CLT and couldn’t see how it could be relevant to his classroom teaching. Then he had an epiphany: 

“I wasn’t actually teaching. I wasn’t actually pushing my students’ cognitive capabilities. I had them engaged in busy work that looked like learning. But I couldn’t have told you what they had learned from one of my lessons. Cognitive Load Theory matters to me now, because I teach explicitly and take responsibility for my students’ learning”. 

So, there you have it - cognitive load theory doesn’t matter where there is no cognitive load, because there is no explicit teaching. But without cognitive load, students are less likely to learn the knowledge and skills that are central to academic and life success. And without a robust model of how to manage this load, teachers are left in the atheoretical wasteland of choose your own adventure, trial and error teaching. No wonder our achievement data in Australia is not shifting and too many students (especially those from equity and diversity groups) are left behind.   

Ironically, the pushback on both AERO and Cognitive Load Theory is led by those who have already leveraged the benefits of educational success in their own lives, but are willing to jeopardise this for future generations, by not backing the strongest horse in the race. 

 

 

Image source: P. Snow 

You can read more about the AERO-Cognitive Load Theory nexus in this excellent piece by Dr Carl Hendrick:

Defending AERO: Evidence-Informed Teaching Isn’t Oppression, It's Empowering

(C) Pamela Snow (2025).