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)
Thank you Pam for this post. As a Leader in a regional school in South Australia, this post really speaks to me. Our school, like many, is stretched for funding and has to carefully allocate every dollar. It is extremely frustrating that our graduates are leaving universities under equipped to teach these foundational skills to our students. We have been very lucky in South Australia to have access to the Literacy Guarantee Unit to provide free resources and training to bridge that gap. However, in SA our Education Leads are pedalling out inconsistent, confusing and frustrating messaging that “no size fits all.” This lack of clarity or resourcing from our Department has left schools and teachers with the burden of sourcing resources and training externally. Thankfully there are resources like Ochre available, but it has still created a financial burden seeking external professional development and learning to build our teachers knowledge. I continue to hope that SA will get back on track before more students suffer.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, and also there is ample evidence that children with low SES, and even low cognitive ability, can achieve proficient literacy levels with effective evidence based teaching methods.
ReplyDeleteThe idea that low literacy is all due to SES, or poor parent engagement, or the number of books in the house, or underfunding, or class sizes, all remain a diversion from the true culprit: decades of ineffective instruction.
The push by the Vic education department sees a one size fits all approach with kids sitting inactive in front of power points while chanting sounds. The department has also put out some very ordinary basic lesson plans that give teachers little scope for a creative approach to meet the needs of a diverse group of kids. The kids now have little opportunity for creative thought or for lessons that may be informed by the kids interests. I agree that phonics, grammar, spelling…all need to be taught…but not at the expense of enjoyable reading activities that encourage creative thought and critical thinking. The schools I worked in last year as a relief teacher did not have a balanced approach. The kids were boarded with the PowerPoints in both literacy and numeracy. On several occasions I actually read interesting picture story books to the students and allowed them to respond in a creative way that addressed punctuation and spelling….the kids loved it. Both of the support staff in the room said they’d never seen every single child engaged like that, ever. It took creative planning on my part…not a PowerPoint developed by somebody else or a bland lesson plan generated for the masses. Yes I focused on phonics for about ten minutes and the rest was revision in a much more engaging way. The kids wanted me to read another story and to do more of the same. Surely the research shows that engagement is a huge factor in the retention of spelling, grammar, sentence structure etc rather than just phonics and another PowerPoint.
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