NAPLAN online trial heralded as a success

An online trial of NAPLAN testing has been hailed a resounding success.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham. Picture: AAP

State and territory education ministers will come under increased pressure to support a shift towards online NAPLAN testing, after a trial involving almost 193,000 students across 1285 schools was hailed a resounding success.

A preliminary report of the trial results, to be presented at today’s Education Council meeting in Adelaide, reveals that 99.9 per cent of the 668,529 individual reading, writing, language conventions and numeracy tests attempted were completed successfully. Just 285 students across 10 schools experienced difficulties and were required to switch to paper tests.

The successful trial, in which all five key performance criteria were met or exceeded, means the number of students moving to online testing will rise to more than 730,000 next year.

However, whether the results temper the concerns of the teachers’ unions — particularly in Queensland where union members voted to boycott the trial — remains to be seen given the political wrangling around NAPLAN.

Opposition education spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek yesterday backed calls for a review of the NAPLAN regime, saying it had become “very high stakes”, which was welcomed by the Australian Education Union.

Ongoing calls for a review of the 10-year-old testing regime, as well as “further union activity”, have been flagged as potential risks to the online rollout by the Education Council’s online assessment working group.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham declined to comment on the report before the meeting but said that feedback from teachers, students and parents had been “overwhelmingly positive”.

“The students I met taking part in NAPLAN online were engaged and incredibly positive students about the assessments and the whole experience, and teachers are looking forward to having richer data at their fingertips more quickly,” he said.

“I’m confident that as we work with states and territories to roll out NAPLAN online nationwide we’ll be able to iron out any issues that come up to ensure we’ve got a system that delivers for schools, for parents and for students.”

Responding to Ms Plibersek’s comments, Senator Birmingham accused Labor of “plotting with the unions to deny parents transparent information about whether their children are meeting basic literacy and numeracy benchmarks”.

“As I’ve said for months, if a wide-ranging review were to happen it would be logical for it to come after the significant improvements set to come from NAPLAN­ online, rather than in the middle of such substantial ­improvements,’’ he said.

The trial also revealed that the platform performed strongly, even during peak periods of testing, and that there were minimal incidents affecting the security of the tests. Only one of those, in which a teacher tweeted an image from a writing test, was considered to be a “major” incident.

“This is the first time a national online testing approach has been successfully implemented in Australia,” the report says.

Education ministers will be asked to note the successful trial results and agree to preparations for next year’s expanded trial.