NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell says no to NAPLAN 2020 as former ACARA head calls for their immediate reinstatement
Education leaders are at loggerheads over NAPLAN 2020 as students lose valuable learning because of the COVID-19 lockdown.
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The NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell has ruled out reinstating NAPLAN later this year despite new figures showing that students struggled with home schooling.
Experts said on Friday the assessment tests were urgently needed to make up lost learning — and should be applied more widely.
“In fact, in these extraordinary times, I suggest that ACARA should scramble and produce tests for all year groups from Year 3 to Year 10,” Dr Fiona Mueller, a former director of the national curriculum body Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), told The Daily Telegraph.
“While NAPLAN remains the only national instrument of academic accountability, it is absolutely vital that we use it in the smartest ways we can. That lack of accountability is one of the main reasons for our failure to set and achieve truly world-class standards in school education.”
Dr Mueller said objections the results wouldn’t come back in time could be solved by fast-tracking NAPLAN online, and protests that 2020 results would be an irregularity only made it all the more imperative to collect the valuable data.
“With all the innovation that schools and teachers have come up with, and with clever assistance from national and state bodies, surely the online challenges can be resolved between now and November,” she said.
“Any concerns that NAPLAN would be a statistical outlier are outweighed by the invaluable insights that the results would reveal.”
NAPLAN 2020 was cancelled due to the COVID-19 shutdown but with schools back earlier than expected, proponents of NAPLAN say is an important tool to assess students after children lost weeks of learning during the shutdown.
Ms Mitchell on Friday said the decision to cancel NAPLAN had been made by all education ministers at Education Council.
“Diagnostic testing is important and it is my expectation that NAPLAN will resume in 2021,” she said.
“NAPLAN is more than 10 years old and NSW is leading a review into NAPLAN that seeks to ensure we have a world class test that accurately measures student growth in numeracy and literacy.”
It comes as new ABS data found parents reported their children’s learning was deeply impacted by distance learning with nearly 60 per cent saying their children had difficulty concentrating, 49 per cent felt lonely and 33 per cent had feelings of anxiety.
The Household Impacts of COVID-19 Survey also revealed one in seven parents said a lack of access to a stable internet connection hindered their children’s ability to school from home and almost a quarter of parents were forced to buy additional equipment such as computers or desks.
Recent Centre for Independent Studies’ research found New South Wales’ disadvantaged students faced between two and three weeks of lost learning in numeracy and between one and two weeks of lost learning in reading, due to the shutdown, exacerbating existing inequities with underprivileged students already approximately 37 weeks behind in numeracy and 35 weeks in reading.
Co-author of the study, Glenn Fahey said skipping NAPLAN entirely this year would deliver too long a break, meaning a current Year 5 student would not have another assessment until they were in Year 7.
“That would be unacceptably long between objective, comparable test results. In the interim, it makes teachers’ work less effective, students’ progress more uncertain, and keeps parents in the dark.
“Policymakers have been too trigger-happy in scrapping NAPLAN.
“Tired old debates about NAPLAN are fixated on whether we keep NAPLAN, not on the more relevant questions of what, how, and when to make NAPLAN work for everyone.”
But a News Corp Australia poll asking people whether NAPLAN should be brought back for 2020 was overwhelmingly against the idea – 76 per cent said it should not be reinstated.
And Australian Parents Council’s President Jennifer Rickard said while the loss of NAPLAN would be felt – particularly by the Year 3 students set to do it for the first time – schools should be focused on settling student back into school.
“There’s no doubt that NAPLAN assessments could provide independent data on how big an impact COVID-19 measures have had on children’s education in the short term, and not having NAPLAN data for 2020 will punch a hole in comparison data, especially for Year 3 students,” she said.
“But for most parents the focus right now is to see children settled back into school and time and resources spent on helping them catch up on things they might have missed and wellbeing measures. NAPLAN simply isn’t a priority for parents given all the upheaval of recent months.”
Students would have been sitting the controversial exams this month and The Daily Telegraph revealed ACARA, for the first time, uploaded questions and answers to NAPLAN assessments after being approached by schools to help them track students.