Over 1.3 million students sat the NAPLAN tests in March, which provides a health check on Australia’s education system.
Now, the results are in. But what do they reveal about the state of education in Australia?
In this podcast, host Kat Clay is joined by education experts Amy Haywood and Molly Chapman to unpack the latest NAPLAN data. They discuss how students are tracking, and what can be done to improve the results across Australia.
Transcript
Kat Clay: In March, over 1.3 million Australian students sat the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy, otherwise known as NAPLAN. These tests are taken every year by students in year 3, 5, 7, and 9 in Australia, and provide a health check on our education system.
Well, this year’s results are in. I’m Kat Clay, and to analyse them, I’m joined by Grattan education experts, Amy Haywood and Molly Chapman to provide insight into how Australian students are tracking. But first, Molly, welcome to the podcast. It is your first time on the pod after starting at Grattan recently.
Molly Chapman: Thanks, Kat. I’m very excited to be here.
Kat Clay: So, Molly, just starting with you. tests, writing, reading, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and numeracy. There’s a lot of things that it tests for. What do this year’s results show?
Molly Chapman: Well, starting with some good news, NAPLAN participation rates rebounded this year reaching 93.8% across all year levels and tests. That’s the highest level we’ve seen, not only since the COVID pandemic, but since 2017. So, there are still some cohorts, like Year nine students who are still below 90% in participation. So, we should keep an eye on them. But in general, this is really promising to see.
We’re also starting to see some green shoots with some small improvements in some average results, particularly in numeracy in the national results. And in Victoria. We’re also seeing an uptick in the rates of proficiency in reading across years five, seven, and nine in the national results. These are only very early signs of improvement, but something to keep an eye on.
Unfortunately, the bad news is that the rest of the results generally confirm the sobering results we’ve seen from the last two years. One in three school students across the country are still falling short of Australia’s proficiency benchmark in literacy and numeracy.
That’s at least 380,000 students across the country. These problems are persistent. The results have barely budged from last year’s or the year before. And importantly, the problems are far reaching. Averaged across year levels and tests, even the best performing state, which was Victoria, has at least 27% of students falling below that proficiency benchmark.
Amy Haywood: And I think, Kat, it’s worth digging into what that proficiency benchmark actually means because it’s relatively new. It’s only since the 2023 NAPLAN tests that we’ve actually had a benchmark for proficiency. So since then, we’ve had performances categorized into four categories. So, we’ve got needs additional support, which is the lowest, developing, strong, and exceeding. And the language can be a bit confusing. But if you’ve got a report card, you’re a parent, you’ve got your child’s report card, and they’re reported as either in needs additional support or developing, that means they’re sitting below that proficiency benchmark. And the reason why we care about proficiency is because it’s a marker of whether students are keeping up with those grade level expectations. And so, it’s not necessarily particularly high. So, for instance, in year three, numeracy the kinds of things that we’re expecting a student to be, if they’re meeting benchmark, they need to be able to solve simple equations using addition, subtraction, multiplication, division.
They need to be able to interpret fractions. Like if they’re shown a number of images of different pizzas, they can identify which one’s cut into halves. And they also need to be able to do things like read time on a clock to the nearest minute and considering that by Grade Three students already in their fourth year of schooling, this is a pretty reasonable expectation that most students should be able to do this.
Kat Clay: So, these are essential skills for life. Molly, what’s the impact of students not being proficient in these areas?
Molly Chapman: The statistics are really easy to rattle off, but behind the data are real children whose future life opportunities are being impacted. If we take one test reading, for example, reading is a gateway skill to so much of school and life. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of school. They’re more likely to end up in the justice system, more likely to earn less and be unemployed.
Kat Clay: And are these results different for different groups of students. How are the different cohorts fairing?
Molly Chapman: For all the talk of equity and excellence in schools, the reality is sadly that certain disadvantaged subgroups are falling behind their more advantaged peers. For example, when we average across all the year levels and all the tests, indigenous students are more than twice as likely to not meet the proficiency benchmark when compared to their non-indigenous peers.
And students whose parents didn’t finish high school are more than three times as likely to not be proficient compared to students whose parents have a bachelor’s degree. it’s not just the disadvantaged students. Even some of the more advantaged students are struggling with one in five students whose parents have a bachelor’s degree also below that proficiency benchmark.
Kat Clay: So, it’s not just about this proficiency benchmark, though. I expect that those gaps are growing over time.
Molly Chapman: Absolutely. If we take for example, students whose parents didn’t finish high school and compare them with students whose parents have a bachelor’s degree, the reading gap between them grows from almost two years in year three to five years by the time they’re in year nine. This means that students who start ahead have an advantage that accumulates as they move through school, and students who start behind just fall even further behind year by year when ideally, we want schools to be reversing this trend.
Kat Clay: So, Amy, talked about it on the podcast before. We have two spectacular reports about the Reading Guarantee and the Maths Guarantee. You’ve obviously been thinking a lot about what we can do to lift proficiency in maths and reading in primary schools. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about this?
Amy Haywood: I suppose the main thing is that what happens in classrooms really matters. How we use those precious minutes that we’ve got with students makes a big impact because we do know that the biggest in-school impact on student outcomes is the quality of instruction that goes on in classrooms.
And we also know that almost all students can get on track in reading and maths if they have high quality whole class instruction and catch up supports where needed. Now it looks a little bit different if you’re thinking about reading versus maths, so I might talk about them separately. What does that instruction look like in reading in the early years, there’s a real strong emphasis on systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics so students can really crack the code. And that means they can decode and read unfamiliar words. And at the same time, that means that we’re exposing students to lots of rich literature through read alouds as a class, as well as explicitly teaching and building up vocabulary, fluency and background knowledge. That’s what reading should look like.
And at the same time, math is a bit similar, but obviously it’s a different subject and that subject’s quite hierarchical. So, we need to really carefully sequence out how we’re teaching new concepts and skills and explicitly teach them step by step, give students a lot of practice so, and then before we ask them to apply skills in more complex situations or novel situations. at the same time, what’ll help us. Is by building up their fluency. So, getting them to practice simple maths facts, addition subtractions times tables. The idea is we want them to become automatic at those kinds of skills, so then they can use their brain capacity more complicated problems.
The thing though is it’s easy for me to say and describe what that is it’s very hard to put that into practice, and it takes a lot of effort to shift instructional practice and teachers just simply can’t do it on their own from all the case study research we’ve done. We just know it takes a whole school approach, and even then, there’s a lot more needed in terms of practical support provided by governments and systems.
Kat Clay: Yeah, and you can read a lot more in depth about our recommendations about reading and maths, our website at grattan.edu.Au. Our reports are there for free, but just turning back to governments, you mentioned them at the end of your response there. Have governments done anything to improve classroom practice in these areas, especially relating to the NAPLAN focus area areas?
Amy Haywood: Yeah, absolutely. There’s been a real, I’d say, changing of the tide in terms of education policy in the last couple of years, and I think a big part of that is a recognition of the importance of classroom instruction and a willingness for ministers and for governments to actually recommend particular approaches.
So explicit approaches to teaching new content, and also those structured early reading approaches. So, in terms of which states have moved we had some first movers, particularly in that early reading space, so Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, and Queensland in 2023. And then last year we also had in Victoria the Deputy Premier and Education Minister commit to taking an explicit approach and updating their teaching and learning model. And something similar happened in New South Wales with the Department Secretary Murat Dizdar, also announcing a similar approach. So that’s thinking about governments.
We’ve also had an, and we shouldn’t disregard the fact that actually, several Catholic Diocese have made similar commitments, so that’s really great to see. I would say though, it is step one and there’s like step 2, 3, 4, 5 and beyond are really thinking about, okay, well what does it take to implement that across all schools?
And that’s when you’d expect to see results shifting on something like a NAPLAN test.
Kat Clay: a good next question. do you think are steps 2, 3, 4, 5, and beyond? especially for governments that are already moving in these areas of practice?
Amy Haywood: Yeah, and I think one of the things that we’d really like to see more movement on is strengthening early screening, particularly in reading and maths. So, there has been some movement particularly with almost all governments committing to implementing a year one phonics screening check in government schools.
That’s really great because I think Year Three is too late to wait to identify learning gaps, particularly in something as vital as reading. We really want to know early whether there’s gaps and fill them quickly so that they don’t become wider. But that fourth year of school is probably too late to wait for something like that.
But what we’d really like governments to do now is actually expand that test. So, it’s not just government schools. We 36% of students are educated in non-government schools in the Catholic and independent sector. We think they should also be doing this test and that also governments and systems should commit to a year two resit process like what they have in England.
And that means that those students that don’t meet the expected benchmark in Year One. They just do the test again in Year Two, and that means we’re actually checking the students that we needed to catch up, did they end up catching up? So, we think there’s movement that can happen in that early reading space on assessments, but then also in maths we’re a bit less progressed.
There’s a commitment to having an early year numeracy screener, but there’s works for governments to do in really finding an efficient screener that’s also research backed and gives reliable results. So, we’re hoping that’s something that governments can work on next.
Kat Clay: Yeah, because you really tap into what the heart of NAPLAN is actually about not just a test that students sit. about trying to improve the system as a whole and see where there are gaps for improvement, which is why we’re making these recommendations to governments. Are there any other areas of action that you see outside of this?
Amy Haywood: Yeah, and I think you are right to think about, all those steps, 2, 3, 4, 5 and beyond. And I think most of those are going to sit in the space of what do we need to do to support teachers and school leaders to actually put that evidence backed instruction. into practice. the first one I think about is really giving teachers the tools of the trade. What do they need to teach well every day? We just know there are too many teachers sitting up late at night planning individual lessons themselves or reinventing the wheel year on year. So, we think that teachers need access to high quality curriculum materials and catch-up learning programs that they can use and adapt for their students.
There is a lot out there. You can find a lot on the internet if you go searching, but it’s not clear what the quality is. And so, we think governments have a role in actually setting up an independent curriculum materials quality assurance process. So, it’s really clear to teachers they have the information about what best choices to make.
So that’s on the curriculum materials side. I think the other part of this is a real dial up in professional development for teachers. Unlike in, say, other professions where there’s just this expectation of ongoing professional development across a career. We don’t have the same thing for teaching.
And so, I think we should learn some lessons and take on board what we’ve seen in other systems like England and Singapore, where they really invest heavily in teacher’s professional development. And so, we are calling on governments to invest in a robust set of micro credentials that are longer term. So, one to two years and really subject specific, so in English and maths.
On the maths one, really getting into the nitty gritty details of, okay, what does it mean to teach the fractions unit in primary school really well, and how does that link up with what’s happened in years previously?
And the other part of that is actually recognizing and spreading the success of our really strong schools. We’ve got some great schools already doing great work in Australia, actually identifying those schools and then funding them to become a hub. That means they’re funded to actually work with nearby schools and provide that really practical on the ground mentoring and coaching to then support their work in schools.
And we think Australia should, across the country, set up about 50 of those.
Kat Clay: Yeah, remember from the Maths Guarantee, Guide, I think you were talking about in New South Wales, the Entrance, there was a group of schools that had done something like this.
Amy Haywood: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And I would a little plug for, we actually did a webinar with the Entrance. If you’re really interested in hearing about their maths instruction, you can spend about an hour hearing, hearing about, it’s up on our YouTube. Yeah, so they, they’re really fascinating because they’ve got a collection of schools in a nearby area and they’ve really committed to taking an explicit approach to teaching, particularly for new content in maths, and they’re sharing the materials and curriculum resources that they’ve created. So, it’s so exciting to see that grassroots work that’s happening on the ground from teachers and how that’s flowing up into policy as well.
Kat Clay: So, we’ve talked about governments, we’ve talked about teachers, but there is a group of people who are also probably concerned about NAPLAN and that would be parents. probably a lot of parents out there listening to this podcast going, what do my child’s NAPLAN scores say about how they’re going, how they’re tracking? Molly, what should parents do if they’re surprised or they’re concerned about their child’s NAPLAN results?
Molly Chapman: NAPLAN provides some really important data because it gives parents an indication of how their child is tracking against other students in Australia.
For each test, the report you receive will show where your child sits against both the national average and then those four proficiency levels that Amy mentioned. While that’s important though it’s really critical to remember that NAPLAN is a one point in time assessment. It measures how your child performs on the day that they sat the test.
Schools will have a range of other data that they collect throughout the year on your student’s performance. Things like screening data, progress monitoring, the little tasks that they complete day to day in the classroom. And if there’s a discrepancy between those results that you’ve been seeing up until NAPLAN and then the NAPLAN results you get, or just generally something that you’re worried about, we’d recommend talking to your child’s teacher to better understand the results and what supports can be offered to them both at school and at home.
Kat Clay: Thank you so much Amy and Molly. We have talked about topics that are covered in our reports, which are available on our website, as I’ve mentioned before, at grattan.edu.au. If you’re on the website, we would encourage you if you can, to please make a donation. We are a not-for-profit organization, which enables us to give independent advice, but we also rely on donations from listeners like you.
So, any donations, big or small are very appreciated. If you’d like to engage with us on social media, you can find us at Grattan Institute across all social media networks. As always, please do take care and thanks so much for listening.