This week, 2025 school National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data was made publicly available via the My School website. In an increasingly data-savvy education sector, school leaders, teachers, policy-makers, academics and other stakeholders have accessed media good-news stories of school and sector improvements, though with varying levels of enthusiasm.
NAPLAN has long been controversial, with teacher unions and many education academics opposed to it, often for reasons that don’t stand up to close scrutiny.
Terms like “high-stakes” and “neoliberal accountability mechanism” are commonly thrown into these discussions, typically with no substantiation and (ironically) without a critical stance on their use. It’s also common for strawman arguments to get an outing when NAPLAN is discussed, e.g., “It’s not diagnostic” (it was never intended to be). Others argue that it is stressful for students, which flies in the face of the fact that schools have always assessed student progress (albeit with varying levels of validity and reliability) and the people who set the tone for assessment contexts are the teachers in the room. There is also an in-built assumption here that it is inherently harmful for students to experience and deal with stress – something that schools are well-positioned to scaffold across the curriculum and across year and ability levels.
While it is human nature to rationalise and displace misgivings that are socially awkward to acknowledge, that doesn't mean the community needs to accept such fig-leaves. As those familiar with my work will know, I am a champion of teachers and their efforts to “know better and do better” in their classrooms, often in spite of the preparation they received in their initial teacher education programs.
Let’s return to first principles and remind ourselves what NAPLAN is and is not, notwithstanding recent changes in the timing of administration and a shift to an adaptive digital platform that was not without some challenges.
NAPLAN is:
1. A population-level data-monitoring tool, designed to track progress of individual students, schools, and systems, with respect to literacy and numeracy instruction. This takes place in Years 3, 5, 7, and 9.
2. A minimum standards check.
3. A form of feedback on instruction.
4. Designed to allow schools, systems and jurisdictions to compare apples with apples, controlling for level of community advantage via the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) value.
5. A means of tracking the progress of equity and diversity groups who are over-represented in lower bands.
6. At least partially a reflection of the instruction students are exposed to – the main variable in students’ lives that schools can actually modify.
NAPLAN is not
1. Diagnostic.
2. Designed to tailor instruction for individual students.
3. High-stakes for individual students (unless the adults make it so).
4. A measure of creativity, collaboration, or any other so-called “21st century skills”.
5. A single measure of the quality of a school or its suitability for a particular child.
In the last five years in particular, Australia has made some genuine policy gains with respect to literacy instruction and numeracy is (finally) starting to catch up. More and more sectors and schools are “on the bus” with respect to evidence-based (explicit) instruction, and their NAPLAN data finally breaks through to reflect the sustained and focused efforts of large numbers of people. It’s not uncommon for growth to be evident to teachers and parents before it reaches the threshold of changing the numbers and colours in NAPLAN data. And when it does, it is validating and affirming, in the same way that when our champion sportspeople display focus and sustained hard work (often out of everyone else’s sight until they “come from nowhere”) to produce wins, trophies and premierships for their teams.
NAPLAN data reports on individuals and teams simultaneously – parents receive data about their individual child, and schools and systems are looking at data derived from the work of teaching and support teams. Increasingly, as with sport, schools are enagaing coaches to support the work of their teachers and upskill them "on the field".
Where once the media were criticised by teacher unions and professional bodies, as well as by education academics for publishing “doom and gloom” stories about NAPLAN results, now they are under fire for publishing stories about schools that have shown significant improvement, often against the odds, given their ICSEA and all that this entails – see here and here.
While I don’t encourage the compilation of so-called “league tables” we should not be surprised that they are created and nor should we insult parents by implying that they are so naïve that decisions about their child’s schooling would be based solely on such a table in a newspaper. By the same token, parents who ignore NAPLAN data are well-advised to consider the costs (financial and emotional) associated with years of tutoring and other forms of support for their struggling offspring.
We’re a nation that thrives on competition and aspiration in sport, but these are apparently unpalatable in fields of endeavour that might create better futures for our children and lead to us becoming a genuinely “clever country”.
We are indeed, as John O’Grady (aka Nino Culotta) famously observed in 1957, a weird mob.
© Pamlea Snow (2025)
