NAPLAN being put to test

The one-off abandonment of NAPLAN this year may be an enduring blow to school accountability.

The literacy and numeracy tests — normally conducted in mid-May — were scrapped amid uncertainty about whether schools would be open across the country, and partly in response to concern over dislocation to regular teaching and learning.

Now, Queensland’s education unions have urged teachers against preparing pupils for next year’s exams — unilaterally declaring the tests are over for good.

In part, the ongoing resistance is driven by claims that test preparation unduly distracts teachers from core work and that it can be taxing on limited instruction time — without necessarily a clear purpose beyond improving test-taking readiness.

In recent years, there have also been increased reports of rogue schools refusing to have students sit the tests, by manipulating parents through unfounded scare campaigns.

If governments cave in to these threats they will do so at the expense of students, parents, taxpayers, and even teachers.

A national review into the reporting of NAPLAN results (particularly the MySchool website) last year found that the tests are broadly supported and useful, according to parents, teachers, and school leaders.

And since NAPLAN tests are ‘low-stakes’ for students (unlike the HSC or selective school placement exams), concerns over potential stress of exams are effectively a non-issue.

OECD research is clear that accountability — when combined with appropriate autonomy — is correlated with higher performing students. For this reason, strengthening, not whittling away, accountability is key to arresting the decline in Australia’s education outcomes.

While it’s now impractical to reverse this year’s ill-advised decision to scrap the tests, policymakers must confront the bigger problem. Halting this year’s testing has strengthened the hand of those who have long opposed standardised assessment and resisted the accountability that comes with it.

What’s telling is that so much effort was exerted to cancel the tests, rather than into making them happen, rescheduling them, or coming up with viable alternatives.

At the time, the potential educational harm was almost universally dismissed by policymakers (and flatly rejected by some educationalists). These denials seem to be in service of a bigger agenda based on the misleading claim that educational achievement can’t be meaningfully measured.

However, the truth is that standardised assessments offer much-needed objective and comparable tools for monitoring students’ progress, informing teaching practice, and measuring performance of teachers and schools.

The OECD-run Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows that student achievement has declined considerably for years, while our domestic NAPLAN results have effectively flatlined. And those problems have been exacerbated by the educational disruption wrought by the pandemic.

The imperative to leverage NAPLAN as a learning diagnostic couldn’t be more apt given the varied and uneven progress students have encountered this year.

That does not mean NAPLAN is perfect. Nobody denies that NAPLAN could be better.

It could be held at a more appropriate time of the school year (and potentially in different year groups), it could be a more rigorous assessment and one varied according to students’ capabilities, its content could be better aligned with curriculum, and it could be online rather than on paper (especially because of far more timely turnaround of test results).

Such upgrades would make it a more effective tool for educators, students, parents, and decision-makers. Abandoning NAPLAN, by contrast, would be a clear step backwards.

NAPLAN is again to be on the agenda for the Education Council — constituted of Australia’s education ministers — due to meet early next month. At the meeting, an ‘independent’ breakaway review of NAPLAN’s ongoing feasibility, commissioned by a coalition of eastern states, is to present its findings.

Reviving Australia’s educational outcomes will depend upon commitment to rigorous national assessment, not more of the same anti-test and anti-performance mentality that threatens to steer the education system yet further astray.

The federal minister has already reiterated that NAPLAN is here to stay. He is right to stand his ground in the interests of student progress.