NAPLAN worked but the future’s brighter

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell: ‘The concept that we must indefinitely stick to one type of diagnostic test is not on.’ Picture: AAP

If there is ever a time to advance NAPLAN into a test that our education system needs, it is now.

Last Friday, professors Barry McGaw, Bill Louden and Claire Wyatt-Smith released their long-awaited review of NAPLAN.

Commissioned by NSW, Victoria, Queensland and the ACT — which collectively educate more than 80 per cent of students in Australia — the report delivers sensible recommendations to improve our national standardised diagnostic testing regime.

First and foremost, the review reaffirms the importance of having a standardised census test. It also reiterates the importance of making the data from such a test publicly available.

The review recommends that NAPLAN should be replaced with a new testing regime — named the Australian National Standardised Assessments. The ANSA would differ from the ­NAPLAN test in a number of ways, all of which are welcome improvements.

The testing window would be brought forward to the start of the year, with results being delivered to schools within a week.

The earlier time frame would stop schools “teaching to the test”, while the rapid return of results would ensure teachers are not waiting six months for them, as has been the case.

If we are serious about lifting outcomes, making sure our schools have this data is important — and the quicker the better.

The testing regime would be expanded to include critical and creative thinking in STEM, recognising that these skills are more important now than ever before as we prepare students for 21st century life.

Substantial changes would be made to the writing component of the test, recognising the present NAPLAN writing component ­encourages formulaic responses and does not appropriately test informative writing.

Accepting the review’s recommendations and upgrading NAPLAN is critically important. We need a world-class diagnostic testing regime across Australia that accurately measures student growth over time, so we can identify where individual students and schools are struggling.

For too long the debate around diagnostic testing has been hampered by NAPLAN’s obvious flaws. Those who are opposed to testing outright have opportunistically jumped on the “let’s-bash- NAPLAN” bandwagon to further their argument that we shouldn’t have any tests in schools lest the public find out which schools need to improve.

We must have accountability for our schools. We must have ­diagnostic testing in our schools. And we must accept NAPLAN — now 12 years old — is considerably out of date and no longer up to the task.

Supporters of NAPLAN have rightly championed its importance to the education landscape in response to the worrying push to remove nationwide standardised testing altogether. But this is an argument in favour of testing and transparency, rather than of NAPLAN itself.

To blindly support NAPLAN when there is an obviously superior ­alternative on the table is ignorance at best, perhaps pigheadedness at worst.

Some might be tempted to argue NAPLAN can be saved, as it is already moving online and that, consequently, there is no need for a new test. Bringing the test online solves one problem. But it does not solve the myriad others, whether it is NAPLAN’s timing, its inability to properly assess writing or its failure to assess STEM proficiencies adequately.

Rejecting a move to ANSA on the grounds that we are already tinkering around the edges with NAPLAN is the equivalent of ­preferring to do a dodgy repair job rather than but a new car.

Indeed, rejecting a move to ANSA out of misplaced loyalty to NAPLAN would put NAPLAN supporters in an unfamiliar place — arguing against the utilisation of improved diagnostic tools, and against improved accountability for our schools.

The concept that we must indefinitely stick to one type of diagnostic test is not on. Our children deserve better. Parents deserve better. Schools deserve better.

This is why I will argue for the Education Council to accept the recommendations of the NAPLAN review. To ignore the recommendations would be to reject a move towards best practice diagnostic testing, and would merely aid those who seek to remove testing from our schools.

Sarah Mitchell is the NSW Minister for Education.