Literacy, numeracy lessons from latest NAPLAN data

Yet again, despite the hostility of teachers unions and many in the education establishment, the value of testing all students’ literacy and numeracy in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 through NAPLAN has been demonstrated in this year’s results. The most striking and concerning point is that in every jurisdiction – with the sole exception of Western Australia – students are going backwards during their school lives.

Nationally, the percentage of students falling below acceptable literacy and numeracy standards rises between year 3 and year 9. In addition to the Northern Territory – where the failures of the school system, especially in remote areas, were detailed last year in our NT: Schools in Crisis series – Queensland and Tasmania are underperforming badly. In both states, more than 40 per cent of year 9 students are below standard in reading and numeracy. At least 400,000 Australian children have fallen so far behind they require catch-up tutoring, education editor Natasha Bita reports. Boys are nearly twice as likely as girls to be starting high school functionally illiterate, the NAPLAN tests reveal, a gap that deserves serious research.

It is also clear that WA’s inclusion of a minimum standard of literacy and numeracy in the year 12 Western Australian Certificate of Education, recognised by universities, industry and post-school training providers, is making a difference in school performance in earlier years. In Queensland, where the state system has been slow to implement the latest improvements to the national curriculum, education standards should be a major election issue in October. The state’s NAPLAN results are abysmal, with 42.2 per cent of year 9 students below par in reading and 40.7 per cent in numeracy. Its challenges of teaching children in remote Indigenous communities are similar to those of WA.

The overall results confirm what experience across the past decade has shown – that extra funding is no panacea. Despite Tasmania spending more than other states per capita on education, its performance is also a scandal. Tasmania’s system – in which many secondary schools stop at year 10, disadvantaging students who live in rural areas and who need to move to complete year 12 – is not serving the state well.

While NSW outperformed the national average, the fact a third of students in our largest state are barely literate at year 9 and fail to meet basic numeracy benchmarks highlights the importance of recent reforms announced by the Minns government. The biggest overhaul of classroom teaching since the 1970s has been designed to ensure students master the basics: maths, reading, writing and grammar under a simplified, clearer curriculum, gutted of jargon and ideology. The initiative has much to offer other states and territories, and especially disadvantaged children whose families are unable to make up for the shortcomings of what is taught in many schools and the detrimental effects of disruption and excessive noise in some classrooms.

The NAPLAN results underline the influence of family backgrounds, with the children of parents with university degrees 16 times more likely to excel at maths in year 9 than students whose parents did not complete year 12. Children of non-English-speaking migrants, however, are outshining local students. Federal Education Minister Jason Clare is right to insist that states sign up to “practical reforms like phonics checks and numeracy checks, evidence-based teaching and catch-up tutoring” to access $16bn in bonus funding. His determination to tie such funding to reforms that will help students “catch up, keep up and finish school” across the next decade is in their interests and those of the nation.