Across Australia, students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 began undertaking their NAPLAN tests this week. NAPLAN is an acronym for the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy. It is a series of four annual tests that serves as a means of benchmarking national performance in the domains of numeracy, reading, writing, grammar & punctuation.

The NAPLAN tests have been a political football since their inception in 2008. Opponents have worried about the overemphasis on external high stakes testing and the fact that some schools place too much curriculum time on preparing for the tests as they believe that their relative performance may impact their marketing or funding.

In international environments, notably in the United Kingdom, there has been a strong correlation between test performance and school standing and many educators believe that this has led to some poor habits where a holistic education has been sacrificed to ‘teach to the tests.’

It is apparent that the predominant concerns with the NAPLAN do not relate to the content of the actual tests. There are inherent problems and compromises involved with testing a large population in a cost efficient manner. Most notably, this causes the distillation of sometimes complex ideas into a multiple-choice question format. Nonetheless, the real concern with NAPLAN has been about how the tests can be used.

After 18 years of testing it seems to me that the Australian context is clearly different from the UK. Over these two decades, the sky has not fallen down and schools have not been overtaken by bureaucrats. I believe that most schools limit their NAPLAN preparation to some brief test familiarisation and have not discarded rich learning opportunities for the sake of higher performance on the tests.

At The King David School we see value in NAPLAN as one of the myriad tools that we can utilise to improve our teaching and learning. NAPLAN offers some very useful data that can help us if it is used in a rational and proportionate way. 

For us to obtain value from NAPLAN, we need to remember that it reflects a snapshot in time that provides some comparative information against a limited scope of the curriculum.

NAPLAN results do not define any student or cohort. Rather, we like to use them amongst a suite of inputs that inform our practice. It offers some insight into a student’s individual performance in the domains and this can be used to prompt us to explore more closely if there is a result that seems anomalous to previous performance. In this way, NAPLAN alongside teacher observations, parental input and a range of other assessments, help us to focus on each student’s progress.

NAPLAN can also be used as one of our means of exploring progress of a cohort or of uncovering if there is a gap in our curriculum delivery. If, for example, a cohort was particularly strong in a component of numeracy we can try to distil what worked well to allow for this to be shared and repeated with future cohorts, and if there is an unexplained cohort-wide gap we can effectively work to adjust our programming to ensure that this is corrected.

At our school we recognise what a great responsibility and privilege it is to be entrusted in developing our students’ identities and their burgeoning capacities across academic, creative, ethical, social, sporting and emotional domains.  Please rest assured that we will continue to utilise whatever information that we can to benefit our students while also keeping an eye to maintaining a cutting edge, engaging and student-centred approach to education. This will ensure that our students are empowered to become their best selves as a consequence of their time with us. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Marc Light