Simon Birmingham rejects calls to scrap NAPLAN

Simon Birmingham has rejected calls to scrap NAPLAN tests, arguing they’re an important source of information for parents.

Simon Birmingham has rejected calls to scrap NAPLAN tests. Picture: Darren Leigh Roberts.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham has rejected calls from his NSW Liberal counterpart to scrap NAPLAN tests for school students, arguing that they remain an important source of information for parents and policymakers.

Senator Birmingham is meeting with state and territory education minister in Adelaide today, to discuss businessman David Gonski’s recent review of primary and secondary education.

NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes is using the meeting to push for NAPLAN to be scrapped, arguing teachers have been motivated to teach to the test, rather than use it as a genuine measure of student success.

Senator Birmingham said the government still believed NAPLAN was an important source of transparent information for parents.

“Just in the last couple of weeks, we’ve had the Parents Council and other parent bodies come out saying very clearly that they want to see NAPLAN continue, that they value NAPLAN, that it gives parents information about the literacy and numeracy skills of their children and how that’s comparing,” the Education Minister told Sky News.

“Now, of course, there are different proposals from some states to look at how some of that information is reported, and if we can do that better in the future, well, we’re open to having a look at it.

“There may be a point of time a long way down the track where, if you fully implement all of the details in the Gonski report, you’re going to get the type of data and so on in a much richer, better way than perhaps NAPLAN gives us today.

“But we’ve actually got to implement all of those recommendations first and that won’t happen overnight, and then you’ve got to make sure that it’s working and delivering for teachers in terms of the information they need, but also for parents and families and the community in terms of transparency that gives everybody confidence that children are learning the basic skills of reading, writing, literacy, numeracy — all of those essentials that provide the foundation upon which the rest of learning depends.”

Senator Birmingham said he hoped state and territory education ministers would agree to Mr Gonski’s recommendations at today’s meeting.

“There’s a lot of work to be done to implement some of the Gonski recommendations.

Today, we’ll hear from David. The state ministers will have a chance to give their feedback, but I hope that they have heard the calls from principal bodies around the country, teacher bodies, parent bodies, a whole range of representative organisations across school stakeholder groups who’ve said they want to see action,” Senator Birmingham said.

“So hopefully today we can agree to progress these recommendations, to go away and then work together on an implementation plan that ensures the record growing funding going into Australian schools turns around poor performance and gets a better outcome for our kids in the future.”

Labor leader Bill Shorten said it was important not to “throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater” in seeking to fix problems with NAPLAN.

“As a parent of teenage kids and kits who have sat NAPLAN, I can see pluses but I can also see minuses, so I would like to see on a bipartisan basis, people working towards seeing how we can improve it, deal with the concerns expressed by front line teachers and parents, but not automatically junk the whole policy overnight,” the Opposition Leader said.