NAPLAN data to map student progress

Schools will be subjected to new measures that detail students’ learning progress over time, amid changes to NAPLAN data.

Year 9 teacher Jenna Andrews with students Kate Wilding and Ben Locke at Clarendon College, Ballarat. Picture: David Geraghty

Schools will be subjected to new transparency and accountability measures that detail students’ learning progress over time, amid changes to the way NAPLAN data is published.

The federal government’s My School website has been redeveloped to provide a greater emphasis on how students’ core literacy and numeracy skills have progressed between Years 3 and 5 for primary school and Years 7 and 9 at the secondary level.

To go live on Wednesday, the new site will contain each school’s 2019 NAPLAN data, including the average student score, graphs detailing student progress and ­tables detailing the percentage of students at each school who achieve above-average progress compared with students from similar socio-educational backgrounds.

Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority chief executive David de Carvalho said the changes had been made to take the focus away from “school-versus-school comparisons that only take account of overall levels of achievement”.

Mr de Carvalho said families would still be able to find out how their child’s school was tracking compared with schools with similar students and make decisions about their children’s education.

The changes follow a national review of NAPLAN reporting and are geared to respond to stakeholder concerns that the way My School presented test data was undermining the benefits of testing.

“It is important to remember that NAPLAN only provides a snapshot in time of achievement,” Mr de Carvalho said. “The changes we are announcing today will hopefully go some way to helping everyone keep ­NAPLAN in perspective.”

Grattan Institute schools education director Peter Goss said the new site was a marked improvement, providing more ­usable information to parents, ­researchers and policymakers.

Previously there was a lack of information on student progress, “the very thing that schools are actually responsible for”.

“This provides more transparency around the core job of schools, which is to maximise the learning of their students,” Dr Goss said.

Ballarat Clarendon College in regional Victoria is one of the state’s best-performing schools. Not only are its NAPLAN scores across all year levels above, or well above, those of students from a similar background, its students also tend to make above-average progress over time.

While education departments nationwide have been trying to tackle the so-called slump in achievement that occurs in Year 9 — which has widely been attributed to students’ disinterest in the test — more than 70 per cent of Clarendon’s Year 9 students made above-average progress in numeracy last year.

About a third made above-­average progress in writing and 56 per cent in reading.

The school’s head of research, Greg Ashman, said there was no “silver bullet” solution to boosting student engagement or achievement. “We try to build a strong culture that values student progress,” Mr Ashman said.

“We believe that progress is motivating; that when students feel like they are improving at something, they will become more engaged.”