After facing a barrage of criticism, NAPLAN is set to be reviewed by a panel of education experts, looking into whether the literacy and numeracy test meets the needs of schools and students.
The review is being led by the governments of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, with an expert panel that will assess whether NAPLAN is accurate at measuring students’ proficiency in reading, writing and numeracy, and that students are being appropriately assessed, as well as the impact on schools and the community.
The test has been taken by students across the country in grades 3 and 5, and years 7 and 9 since 2008. Now over a decade on, Victorian Education Minister James Merlino says it is “common sense to review it”.
Lucy Honan has been a teaching English and humanities to high school students in the public system for 10 years. Her first year on the job was when the Gillard-led Labor government introduced the NAPLAN test.
With results made visible on the MySchool website, Ms Honan says it has only added mounting pressure onto schools and teachers, and unnecessarily so, claiming that the test is ineffective when it comes to understanding student’s abilities.
“It’s really not useful for teachers because, well in the first instance we get the results months and months after the students do the test, so you’d be a pretty lousy teacher if you were waiting months to figure out if your student needed an intervention,” Ms Honan told Neos Kosmos.
She says NAPLAN is a very blunt instrument that may tell teachers for example that a student didn’t do very well at comprehension questions on a particular day, but doesn’t explain why that was. While teachers have other assessment methods used throughout the year to assess their students challenges and strengths, that provide an understanding of why that is, and so are able to respond appropriately to the specifics of that student.
“So teachers don’t need NAPLAN, I think that’s what’s really important for parents to understand. But it’s been sold to parents as though teachers do need it and do want it. I don’t know a single teacher that wants it,” she said.
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The premise of the test is to assess students’ literacy and numeracy based on skills developed and improved over time through the curriculum, with the no need for direct NAPLAN preparation. Ms Honan says that while some schools do take this approach, namely elite schools, for most schools she says “it’s totally prep all the way”.
“It’s widespread that schools are spending all of Term 1 preparing students. They’re rejigging the curriculum so that the language forms, the specific topics that are going to be on NAPLAN, will be taught just before, so it’s fresh in the kids’ minds.
“All the while all the other things in the curriculum are getting squeezed.”
When it comes to newly arrived students from overseas, such as those who have come from Greece, they are exempt from taking NAPLAN. But for migrant children who still don’t have the assumed knowledge and cultural capital that other students have 12 months on, they can be seen as a liability by the school when it comes to overall results.
One criticism of NAPLAN has been that it has pit schools against one another. But Ms Honan is convinced that this isn’t a side effect of the test, but rather the whole point of NAPLAN.
“When Gillard introduced it, it was all about accountability and it was based on the idea that NAPLAN results would be put on MySchool so as to kind of bring it to the clear light of day which schools are doing well, and which schools are doing poorly so that parents then have to make a judgement about which schools are good schools. But the truth is, NAPLAN results consistently correspond to socio-economic status, that’s what they reflect every single time,” Ms Honan said.
As a consequence, she says over the last 10 years this has resulted in a stratification within the education system, with parents choosing schools with the highest socio-economic status in their area, or in some cases even moving to another area, resulting in the lower performing schools becoming “dumping grounds” with a concentration students from the of the lowest socio-economic backgrounds, rather than a good social mix.
St John’s College Director Learning Tim O’Leary told Neos Kosmos while the school acknowledges that NAPLAN does receive criticism that they see it for what it is “a measure that allows us to ask questions about our students’ learning”.
“This means that we can compare our students’ level of achievement, and more importantly the growth in their learning, against the nation. It also helps us to track our students’ growth, identify areas that require focus and continually evaluate our impact as a school,” Mr O’Leary said.
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While many teachers have welcomed the suggestion NAPLAN could be scrapped as a result of the review, they are also fearful what could replace it: personalised standard-based testing across the curriculum. Without more teachers speaking out, it is near impossible to have an informed public debate.
“To me that rings bells of what’s happened in the UK and the US where it’s even more constant testing. And I think that would be a really dreadful thing because it doesn’t solve any of the essential problems,” says Ms Honan. “The thing that’s at the heart of a good education system is good quality teachers who are trusted to do their jobs and I think this whole testing thing is about not trusting teachers to do that. It’s about saying we’re suspicious, you need to be accountable and so on.”
Instead, Ms Honan says that the accountability needs to be shifted away from teachers to governments, highlighting that total government spending on schools is higher in the private sector than on public – a fact the MySchool website disguises, making it appear like an even playing field.
“It’s totally unsustainable, the idea that the teacher has to bridge the gap that the government is constantly widening itself. As a teacher you’re personally exhausted all the time just trying to scramble up a hill.
“Where’s their accountability in terms of public school funding and equity and needs-based funding? There is no accountability on them. We know world’s best practice is that class sizes should be less than 20 and yet they’re not in Australia, how can we be saying that we have the world’s best education system and that we want our schools to be competing internationally if we can’t even have that?”
The panel is expected to provide an interim report to the national education council in December, with a final report to follow in June 2020.