How Brisbane’s 50 biggest primary schools performed in national tests

Several southside state primary schools are holding their own against the city’s top private schools, NAPLAN results released on Wednesday show.

Analysis of this year’s school-by-school results has shown that among Brisbane’s largest schools, some of the largest leaps in performance are occurring in the public system.

Meanwhile, the capital has seen some of Queensland’s most-improved results in primary-level numeracy, writing, and reading.

Warrigal Road State School in Eight Mile Plains has 1200 students.Credit: Warrigal Road State School

Analysis by this masthead showed five of the city’s 50 largest primary schools improved their year 5 cohorts’ performance across all three measured subjects – reading, writing, and numeracy – by more than the average of schools with comparable student bodies.

Those schools were Warrigal Road State School in Eight Mile Plains, Indooroopilly State School, MacGregor State School, Anglican Church Grammar School, and Sunnybank Hills State School.

Warrigal Road’s principal Andrew Duncan said the school had counter-intuitively let out the leash on its 1200 students.

He said the school had introduced targeted strategies across reading and numeracy, but was also fostering self-awareness in its young cohort by teaching students they did not need to ask permission for all simple activities.

“That has made a huge difference for our school,” Duncan said.

“If they’re not ready to learn – sometimes we all come to work not ready to do our job – we talk about what strategies they can actually use to get themselves back in a phase where they are ready.

“If they say ‘I need to go for a run to the tree’, just to regulate themselves and be ready to learn, then they just ... run out to the tree and come back, and off they go.”

The school has an ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage) percentile of 80, so authorities compared it against other schools slightly more privileged than the national average.

In 2023, the school’s results were on par with comparable schools across all four NAPLAN subject areas, including writing, grammar, spelling, and numeracy, but students lagged in reading.

By 2025, the same cohort’s average results had jumped a band, with students now scoring standard results in reading, and above-average scores in all other subjects except spelling.

This year is the first year the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Regulation Authority (ACARA) has measured progress since its system overhaul in 2023.

ACARA chief executive Stephen Gniel said the reintroduction of progress measurement meant student achievement could be better tracked as children progressed through their primary and middle school years.

“Student progress data provides the information to celebrate improvement in a fairer way,” Gniel said.

Indooroopilly and MacGregor state schools and Anglican Church Grammar School achieved similar levels of improvement to Warrigal Road, with about 60 per cent of students improving by an above-average amount across all three measured subjects.

But out of Brisbane’s 50 largest schools teaching primary levels, Sunnybank Hills State School saw the greatest improvement. There, as many as 71 per cent of students hit above-average levels of progress.

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