NAPLAN supported as ‘an important tool’

The chief executive of ACARA has strongly defended the value of NAPLAN running against calls from NSW Education Minister to scrap the test.

Mr Randall said ­“NAPLAN doesn’t test everything that happens in classrooms and it isn’t intended to … it does look at the critically important skills of literacy and numeracy”.

The chief executive of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority has strongly defended the value of NAPLAN in an open letter to parents, running against calls from NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes to scrap the literacy and numeracy test.

In an open letter to parents yesterday, ACARA head Robert Randall stood by the industry body’s support for ­the Nat­ional Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy, describing it as an “important tool” for parents and teachers to see how individual students compare with “the rest of Australia’s children”.

While Mr Randall said ­“NAPLAN doesn’t test everything that happens in classrooms and it isn’t intended to … it does look at the critically important skills of literacy and numeracy”.

The ACARA chief also said students who felt anxious about undertaking the test should remember “no extra preparation is required … it’s not a big deal” and it is “a short assessment taken only four times during their schooling”.

Mr Randall’s open letter, which is sent yearly to parents ahead of the annual reading, writing and numeracy tests, runs contrary to Mr Stokes’s comments on Friday, where he called for ­NAPLAN to be abolished.

At an Education Council meeting with his federal, state and territory counterparts in Adelaide, Mr Stokes argued for an urgent scrapping of NAPLAN, saying it was being used dis­honestly as a vehicle to extort money from students and families. He suggested NAPLAN be replaced by a less “high stakes” test that ­assessed a student’s progress, as recommended by David Gonski.

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham told his colleagues that the latest Gonski report was based heavily on research and analysis informed by NAPLAN testing. “NAPLAN will not be going away any time soon because it is an important deliverable in terms of giving Australian parents information about how their child is tracking,” he said.

Bill Shorten also told reporters last week he wanted to take a cautious approach to reviewing ­NAPLAN. “I’d like to see on a bipartisan basis people work towards seeing how we can improve it, deal with the concerns expressed by frontline teachers and parents but not automatically junk the whole policy overnight,” the Opposition Leader said.