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)