Queenscliff Primary, Nazareth Catholic shine in 2025 NAPLAN results
As school communities wake up to learn how their NAPLAN results fell nationally, two Geelong schools have earned their place in a small lists of institutions outperforming expectations across Australia.
Geelong students are making progress in leaps and bounds across reading, writing and numeracy as many schools across the region celebrate their strongest-ever NAPLAN results.
New National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy data, to be released on Wednesday, offers the first post-Covid view of students’ progress over the past two years.
At Queenscliff Primary School, 96 per cent of year 5 students – who sat NAPLAN for the first time in 2023 – recorded well above average results in reading and grammar, compared with students from a similar background.
Above 90 per cent of the school’s year 5 students also achieved well above average results in writing, numeracy and spelling.
The school’s biggest improvement was seen with year 5 students achieving an average score of 534.4 across the five domains – up 16.6 points compared to last year.
Principal Mat McRae said the regional school had undergone some “significant growth” over the past three years and it was just beginning to show.
“We’re making sure teaching is genuinely responsive to what students are demonstrating,” he said.
“Every lesson begins with review and retrieval to secure long‑term memory.
“You can go in with a plan, but it doesn’t always land, so teachers are adjusting during the lesson rather than just moving on.”
Mr McRae said since the school adopted the education department’s Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0, fewer students were struggling to keep up.
The region’s 2024 top performing high school Kardinia International College this year improved its year 9 average.
Senior school head Kath O’Neill said Kardinia was “rapt” with the results, which saw year 9s achieve an average of 629.4 across all categories.
“It’s a reflection of our culture of learning, kids here just really value learning,” she said.
“Then we use our NAPLAN results to look at trends, to see if there are gaps in our teaching and it helps inform targeted teaching.”
NAPLAN results for 2025 were on Wednesday released on the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s (ACARA) MySchool website.
ACARA also released a small selection of schools outperforming expectations, chosen from the My School NAPLAN student progress data.
Schools on the list demonstrated the highest average proportion of students making above-average progress across the three NAPLAN domains – reading, writing and numeracy in years 3 to 5, 5 to 7 and 7 to 9.
Twenty metro schools made the national “making a difference” list, along with 21 regional campuses.
Among these were Nazareth Catholic Primary School in Grovedale, Torquay Coast Primary School and Colac’s St Mary’s School, all returning “well above” and “above” average NAPLAN results when compared to students from a similar background.
Nazareth principal Reuben Johnson said the entire school community was delighted with the results.
“A huge team effort,” he said.
Mr Johnson said they had worked hard to focus on student’s “points of need”.
“We continuously reflect on classroom practice to reduce students’ cognitive load.
“Our staff have taken that on board and worked incredibly hard.”
ACARA chief executive officer Stephen Gniel said the MySchool website would provide parents and the community with clear and transparent data on the nation’s schools.
“The return of information on student progress … shows how much the same students at the same school have improved since their previous NAPLAN assessments,” he said.
“Student progress data provides the information to celebrate improvement in a fairer way that considers the individual circumstances of a school, as well as to better identify areas for renewed or continued focus.”
Originally published as Queenscliff Primary, Nazareth Catholic shine in 2025 NAPLAN results
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