By Noel Towell and Alex Crowe
Senior students at Victoria’s top-performing state schools have outshone their peers at some of the state’s best private schools in this year’s NAPLAN results.
Analysis of this year’s NAPLAN data for the state’s 25 best-performing public and private schools in last year’s VCE shows strong results for years 7 and 9 in reading, writing, spelling, grammar and numeracy.
Proven performers such as Ballarat Clarendon College, Fintona Girls’ School, Balwyn High School and East Doncaster Secondary College have recorded aggregate scores across years 7 and 9 of more than 6000 in this year’s results for all Victorian schools, published on Wednesday morning.
But year 9 students at selective state schools Suzanne Cory High, Mac.Robertson Girls’ High and Nossal High School matched or surpassed many of their private school counterparts in this year’s NAPLAN. Melbourne High School’s year 9s scored the highest among the schools in our analysis with an aggregate of 3526. Melbourne High does not offer year 7.
National NAPLAN results published in August showed Victorians rating well against interstate peers in the tests. The state’s students were at or around the national average in 19 of NAPLAN’s 20 benchmarks.
However, experts were worried about the 29.3 per cent – or about 88,000 – of the 300,000 Victorian youngsters sitting the test this year who were rated as either “developing” or “needing additional support”.
Fintona Girls’ School deputy principal Ruth McKinnon with students (left to right) Eliza Creek, Mila Masalkovska and Jana Bouralexis. Credit: Joe Armao
Fintona – one of the top performers on The Age’s index of schools that offer both years 7 and 9 – scored an aggregate NAPLAN grading of 6556 across both years, including 3334 for the year 9s.
Deputy principal Ruth McKinnon welcomed the results but said NAPLAN was not a big focus of Fintona’s academic efforts.
“It is pleasing, but to be honest, we don’t teach to NAPLAN,” McKinnon said.
“If you have a good foundation of literacy and numeracy – and we think that’s important for any student, so we push that – it flows through to the good NAPLAN results.”
McKinnon said Fintona was careful not to put pressure on students to perform strongly at NAPLAN time.
“We don’t want to get that anxiety up in students or parents, and to be honest, it [NAPLAN] doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know,” she said.
“The kids who do well are the ones we would have picked.”
At Preston High, one of the state’s best-performing VCE schools, data is at the core of its success.
Principal Sean Butler said teachers at Preston looked at students’ achievement data every fortnight to determine their needs.
Preston High principal Sean Butler with some of the school’s high achievers.Credit: Joe Armao
“There’s no point teaching students for months before you realise that you’re pitching too high or too low,” Butler said.
“We need teachers to know, as they’re teaching, where their children are at, what they’re understanding and what their next steps are.”
Preston, where the year 9s achieved an aggregate score of 2986 in this year’s NAPLAN, prioritises continual improvement over formal tests.
“We don’t give grades or percentages to our year 7 to 10 students,” Butler said. “We give them a developmental rubric that focuses on their growth and learning progress towards a particular skill.”
The state school sets its students a benchmark of at least 12 months’ learning progression each year, while aiming beyond that.
Its commitment to ensuring all students excel was recognised with a Victorian Education Excellence Award in the Outstanding Provision for High-Ability Students in 2024.
“Our focus as a school is to say, ‘Whatever your starting point is, our job is to keep pushing you up beyond that,’” Butler said.
“So if you’re entering year 7 and you can do year-9 level statistics, that’s great, but let’s push on to the year-10 level statistics.”
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