NAPLAN: a road map to better learning outcomes

The National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy has a narrow focus on a limited set of skills and is a crude, blunt measure of educational achievement, teachers and other critics have long complained. The Australian supports national testing of literacy and numeracy as a diagnostic tool for improving standards. More sophisticated evaluations of school performance are available, most of which, unfortunately, bear out the latest NAPLAN results, which show a chronic lack of progress in students’ academic achievement since testing began more than a decade ago. Preliminary results from this year’s tests, Rebecca Urban writes today, show that average scores have stalled. The small pockets of improvement seen in Year 3 reading, spelling and grammar and Year 5 reading, spelling and numeracy are being lost as students move up. Average writing scores for years 7 and 9 have declined since 2011 while average secondary school scores for reading, spelling, grammar, punctuation and numeracy are unchanged. Across these years, school operating spending by all levels of government has been rising — from $36.4 billion in 2008 to $57.8bn in 2017. Rather than serving as an excuse to inflict a death of 1000 cuts on NAPLAN, the lessons contained in the latest results must be heeded.

Teachers who insist NAPLAN marks are not the final word in students’ achievements have a point. But it cannot be denied that reading, writing and numeracy are the building blocks of further education, regardless of students’ aspirations and talents. In an age of rapid change and enormous possibility, today’s Year 1 children will grow up to enjoy a breathtaking range of ­career options, demanding skills far beyond those tested in NAPLAN. High-level creative thinking, logical reasoning, a propensity for learning and a disciplined approach to work will be vital in future tertiary courses and careers. But that is no reason to play down the traditional basics.

To the contrary, lack of mastery of numeracy, for example, undermines students’ ability and confidence to take on more challenging maths courses as they progress. As Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel pointed out in a speech to the fifth International STEM in Education Conference in Brisbane in November last year, Australian education has presided over a 20-year decline in the proportion of students taking intermediate and advanced maths at Year 12. In 2016, just 7 per cent of female Year 12 students and 12 per cent of male students took advanced maths. By dropping the subject, students limited their career options in fields such as science, economics, medicine, engineering, geography and architecture, to the detriment of the nation’s skills base, economy and productivity.

Today, Centre for independent Studies research fellow Blaise Joseph confirms what other educators have argued in The Australian for years: the standards in NAPLAN testing are not onerous. One in five Australian Year 4 students is below the literacy standard in reading, according to the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, he points out. But just 4 per cent of Australian Year 3 students are below the NAPLAN minimum standard for reading.

From its inception, a significant advantage of the NAPLAN system has been its capacity to allow schools to identify areas of weakness, compare their own performances with comparable schools, adapt their approaches to literacy and numeracy teaching, and monitor outcomes of individual classes across years 3, 5, 7 and 9. The widespread flatlining of results reported today suggests too few schools are using the opportunity the system provides. In recent years The Australian has focused on numerous government and low-fee non-government schools that have risen above the pack. Many of them have been in isolated or disadvantaged outer metropolitan or regional areas with high unemployment rates. Many have included a high proportion of students from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

Despite many contrasts, the schools where students’ NAPLAN scores progressed in leaps and bounds across several years, such as Mark Oliphant College in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, have shared common features. Principals have set high expectations; dedicated teachers have focused on explicit teaching; students, their families and the schools have shared a sense of mutual obligation towards a shared goal — academic excellence; and classroom environments have been optimised to maximise learning and to discourage disruptions.

Yesterday, we agreed with the Grattan Institute that teacher quality was the driver of classroom reform. In July, we remonstrated about the lack of training in phonics teaching in education degrees, despite decades of research proving its value. NAPLAN is not a full picture of what goes into a quality education. It is a valuable snapshot of students’ skills in the building blocks of learning in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. It is not above improvement but it is too important to discard.