Education Ministers meet on Gonski 2.0 reforms as NSW calls to scrap NAPLAN
EDUCATION Minister Simon Birmingham has rejected a call to dump the controversial NAPLAN test before meeting with state ministers to discuss Gonski 2.0 reforms. VOTE, HAVE YOUR SAY
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EDUCATION Minister Simon Birmingham has rejected a call from his NSW counterpart to urgently dump the controversial NAPLAN test.
NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes pushed for the Federal Government to replace the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy tests with a less high-stakes test when federal, state and territory education ministers met to discuss the Gonski 2.0 reforms in Adelaide today.
Earlier today, the NSW minister signalled he would argue the test had failed by becoming a marketing tool for private schools and a cash cow for education businesses selling materials and services to students desperate to do well.
He told Fairfax Media the NSW government would immediately pull the state out of the test if it wasn’t tied to federal education funding.
“I’m not saying standardised tests are not important, but we can do them better,” he said.
Mr Stokes told Fairfax Media an industry had grown up alongside the NAPLAN, where teachers were being encouraged to teach to the test rather than the curriculum.
“It’s become a vehicle for edu businesses to extort money out of desperate students and their family,” he said.
“When you now have private schools marketing their NAPLAN success, that points to the failure of NAPLAN, and it’s time we had discussions about replacing it.”
Minister Birmingham poured cold water on the suggestion this morning however, saying: I disagree with Rob, I think that NAPLAN serves a very important purpose for many Australian parents.”
“Just the other week we had a joint statement from the Australian Parents Council, the [Australian] Council of State School Organisations and the Isolated Children’s Parents Association all backing in their support for NAPLAN because parents make clear they want to see how their children are progressing,” Senator Birmingham told ABC radio.
“They want to know whether their children are learning very clearly the basics of literacy and numeracy that NAPLAN assess.”
The federal government has already agreed to discuss a review of reporting attached to NAPLAN later this year.
The review is expected to occur after the test goes online over the next three years.
Following the meeting, Senator Birmingham said state ministers had agreed to work through the recommendations of the Gonski 2.0 report and consider how they could be implemented as part of a new future national school reform agreement.
‘DUMP NAPLAN’
NSW’s Labor education spokesman Jihad Dib has backed the call to dump NAPLAN and even reportedly wants the test data to be immediately removed from the My School comparison website.
Mr Stokes told Fairfax the test had become a rating tool for schools, rather than a measurement of student progress, saying: “I am all for transparency, but this is not transparency — this is actually dishonesty.”
The Minister will back the introduction of less high-stakes tests that are smaller and held more regularly.
The so-called formative testing was a recent recommendation of the Gonski education report, made public earlier this week.
The online tests would allow teachers to monitor a student’s progress in real time.
Mr Stokes will call on the Federal Government to “act with some urgency” given Australian students continue to fall in world education rankings.
“Mr Gonski’s report makes it clear — it makes the statement that we need to be acting with some haste. I think we can do better, and we can act now,” he told Fairfax.