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 325,000 Year 3 students sat NAPLAN this year, and approximately 10.8% scored in “needs additional support” band, this means we’re talking about some 35000 students nationally needing intensive support, but fewer than 7000 of these students will actually catch up. Think about the compounding effects as the remaining 28000 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)