By Bridie Smith and Caroline Schelle
Victoria’s 100 best-performing primary schools and 100 top secondary schools under NAPLAN have been revealed, with principals saying students can succeed if they set high expectations, regardless of their background.
Analysis of the 2024 NAPLAN results by The Age shows select-entry schools such as Melbourne High School and Mac.Robertson Girls’ High School were among the secondary schools topping the list.
Principal Jacob Mathews with students and staff from Lighthouse Christian College Cranbourne.Credit: Simon Schluter
Other government schools to make the grade included Balwyn High, Glen Waverley, McKinnon and Port Melbourne secondary colleges and Frankston High School.
State primary schools including Harrietville, Strathewen, Thomastown East and Oakleigh South also made the list, along with Birralee Primary School in Doncaster East.
Also among the best were schools with combined primary and high school cohorts, including Ballarat Clarendon College, Haileybury, Camberwell Grammar, Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Fintona Girls’ School and Scotch College.
Schools on the list are given in alphabetical order and not ranked in order of achievement, because the results reflect raw test data and are not weighted for schools’ socioeconomic status.
Not all the high-achievers were high-fee-paying schools. At Lighthouse Christian College Cranbourne, where fees are on average less than $2000 a year, the school’s results were anything but ordinary. The co-educational college in Melbourne’s south-east was one of the strongest-performing secondary schools in the state. Its results place it among the top 10 secondary schools and among the top-four independent schools.
NAPLAN (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy) tests are sat in March by all students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 and assess their reading, writing, spelling, grammar and numeracy.
On all counts at all-year levels, Lighthouse Christian College Cranbourne’s students performed well above average.
It’s a result that backs up the school’s performance in previous years and which makes principal Jacob Mathews incredibly proud.
Mathews says the results are all the more impressive given more than 90 per cent of the school’s students have a language background other than English, and about 10 per cent of the school’s 1015 students are refugees.
Most students are of African heritage, but there are also students of Samoan, Malay, Sri Lankan and Indonesian heritage.
“It’s amazing how they come together as one and all work together,” he said.
Mathews, who is from Malaysia, has been at the school since it opened in 2008. He said the results were a tribute to a combination of factors, including the students’ Christian faith, families’ high level of engagement and teachers’ dedication to students’ success.
He also pointed to the school’s tutoring program, which begins before the school year starts and runs through the year, and also highlighted the time that former students give by returning to the school to help with marking and checking homework.
“It’s good for them to earn some money to pay off their student debt,” he said. “They know how the school runs and understand students.”
Mathews said he also regularly used the school newsletter to remind parents of the negative impact of social media, pointing out that it distracted students from their studies.
Another standout was Serpell Primary School at Templestowe, in Melbourne’s east, which achieved results well above average in nearly all categories for years 3 and 5.
Principal Wilma Culton put her school’s success down to its culture, which focuses on high expectations, excellent teaching capacity and explicit instruction.
Serpell Primary School teacher Louise Nixon (left) and principal Wilma Culton with students after the school’s year 3 and 5 students achieved exceptional NAPLAN results.Credit: Simon Schluter
She said the school’s unique philosophy program for students from prep to year 6, which teaches children how to be analytical and gives them reflection tools, was also a factor.
“They use a whole range of tools in the subject, they learn how to reason, how to agree or disagree and how to ask questions,” Culton said.
Children would read a story and then explore the issues and values that are in it, she explained, adding this could include values such as trustworthiness, freedom, compassion and responsibility.
“[The children] could be asked to look at the character in the story and how they demonstrated they were responsible, and what it means to be responsible,” she said.
She said the class was set up so only one person spoke at a time, and students learnt how to build on each other’s ideas.
“They absolutely love it,” Culton said.
“We find they use that language in the school as well, saying they’d like to ‘build on something’ and listening to others.
“We know and care for our students, and a consistent approach over time has resulted in a reliability of outstanding learning outcomes.”
All the school’s teachers are trained in English as an additional language, which benefited the 83 per cent of students who speak another language at home.
“It’s rare,” she said, explaining it was expensive to have teachers specialised in that field.
Victorian Principals Association deputy president Deborah Grossek said NAPLAN was a valuable tool to analyse performance.
However, Grossek, who is also principal of Glendal Primary School in Glen Waverley, in Melbourne’s east, said just because a school performed well didn’t mean the school stopped working to improve.
“We’re always looking at areas to improve, because you have different cohorts of children coming through every year.”
Weighted data is available at the MySchool website.
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