Australia’s primary school students could face fitness tests as part of a NAPLAN overhaul

EXCLUSIVE: Students as young as nine would be forced to take fitness exams so schools across the country can be ranked on obesity in a plan to overhaul controversial NAPLAN testing.

NAPLAN testing could change eating and fitness habits for good.

STUDENTS as young as nine would be forced to take fitness exams so schools across the country can be ranked on obesity in a plan to overhaul controversial NAPLAN testing.

The shock recommendation is made in a yet-to-be released Baird government report that partly blames childhood obesity on schools refusing to teach sport seriously.

It will reveal 80 per cent of primary school sports teachers aren’t specialists. And nearly half of high school sports classes were too easy.

Just one in three students across primary and secondary schools were in the right “muscular fitness zone”.

Fitness standards could change forever.

The Saturday Telegraph has obtained an “in confidence” document summarising recommendations from the yet-to-be-released NSW Schools Physical Activity and Nutrition Survey (SPANS), conducted every five years and based on 7500 students.

Written by lead researcher Dr Louise Harding, it says one of the recommendations of SPANS will be “incorporating physical activity as a mandatory reporting outcome linked to NAPLAN”.

The annual assessments currently test students in years 3, 5, 7, and 9 in literacy and numeracy. School rankings are then made available to parents.

Dr Harding said the SPANS report found “many health behaviours require ongoing attention”. Her document recommends schools try harder to “employ specialist physical education teachers”.

It says SPANS found just one in five kids was meeting the required amount of daily physical activity. Dr Harding also warns of a rise in high school students “classified as overweight or obese” since the last SPANS study in 2010.

Parents’ Voice campaign manager Alice Pryor last night said she supported more attention on sport, but feared how competitive schools would police “the fitness of kids”.

“If you introduce it in the form of testing it has to be done in a sensitive way so we’re not compounding the mental health issues,” she said.

NSW Primary Principals Association president Geoff Scott said the idea was “ludicrous”, adding that the controversial NAPLAN scheme was “unreliable data source”.

But David Hope, president of the Northern Sydney District Council of P & Cs, said the idea had merit. “NAPLAN doesn’t really measure everything that a child has in their basket of skills,” he said.

An Education Department spokesman yesterday said it was “working closely” with the Ministry of Health to reduce childhood obesity.

A NSW Health spokeswoman said the SPANS survey was “currently being finalised for publication”.

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