Unpacking the 2024 NAPLAN results

The 2024 NAPLAN school test results show one in three Australian students are not on track with their learning. 

The results also reveal deep inequities in Australian schools. Indigenous children, children from disadvantaged families, and children from regional and remote areas are falling years behind their more advantaged peers as they move through school.

In this special Grattan Podcast, our NAPLAN specialists Amy Haywood and Nick Parkinson identify why students are performing so poorly, and what governments should do to turn this around so all young Australians gain the literacy and numeracy skills they need to have their best chance in life.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Grattan Podcast. My name’s Amy Haywood. I’m the Deputy Program Director in the Education Program, and I’m joined here by Nick Parkinson, who’s a Senior Associate in the program as well. I’d like to acknowledge that we’re recording on the lands of the Wurundjeri, Woiwurrung, and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation, and we pay our respects to their Elders before we begin.

Past, present, and emerging. Today, we’re here to talk about NAPLAN. So, Australia’s National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy. And I’ve brought along Nick because he’s our dedicated NAPLAN guru. the NAPLAN results have just come out. So over, or more than a million students back in March sat the NAPLAN tests and now we know how they went.

So, to unpack those results, Nick’s going to talk us through what they look like. So, to start off with, for those people who might be listening and don’t necessarily know what NAPLAN is, what. Actually, is it? And why should we care? Yeah, I can tell you all about that, Amy, and it’s a special day in the school education calendar for me.

It feels a little bit like Christmas, you know, I get all excited. I am self-confessed a bit of a NAPLAN nerd, and I’ve even been going back and looking at the tests that I would have done, which I know we’ll dig into a little bit later today. So, what is NAPLAN? Well, it’s a national assessment. It’s been around since about 2008, and it tests students’ ability in reading, writing, and Writing, spelling, and grammar, and punctuation, as well as numeracy.

The tests range between about 45 to 65 minutes, and they’re mostly done online these days. And that’s because that allows it to be tailored to students’ ability. So, depending on how students go and how they’re responding, they’ll get more difficult or simpler questions. It’s really useful, and the reason I, you know, look forward to this day is it’s a bit of a health check on the education system.

So, it tells us where we’re doing really well and where there’s opportunities to improve. Something that, parents who are listening to this podcast might have noticed if they’re looking through their children’s NAPLAN results is they do look a little bit different last year and this year. And that’s because in 2003, Education Ministers agreed to reboot the NAPLAN time series and the NAPLAN scale.

So now when we look at students results, we get our students categorized into four different levels of proficiency and they are from the least proficient to most proficient, needs additional support, developing strong and exceeding. Importantly, this has set a new, what we would call a proficiency benchmark.

So, students who are in the strong or exceeding categories have met that benchmark, and that means they’re broadly on track with their learning and have demonstrated a mastery of the curriculum content, from the years prior to the test. Yeah. And I think that’s something that we’ve been, in our end, excited about, having that new proficiency benchmark.

The other thing, I know you’ve been doing a little bit of research looking into what’s actually on the test. So, can you give people a flavour of what students actually have to do? Yeah, sure can, Amy. And as I mentioned, I really went back and I thought, what did a young Nick, now quite a few years ago, which is making me feel slightly old, do back in the 2011 NAPLAN tests.

and those are online, so you can look at them yourselves. In writing, we were asked to Right, about whether or not people might be spending too much money on toys and games. So, you had to take a position, you had to argue persuasively. I can’t quite remember what I might’ve said about that. I think I probably would’ve said something like, oh, toys, toys and games, give us more!

In terms of numeracy, there’s a bunch of different questions, but I was looking through the Year 9 test ISAT, and one of the questions was, Jane buys a 1. 25 litre bottle of drink and a 375 ml can of drink, so how much drink does Jane buy in total? And that’s really thinking about students working with decimals, doing some unit conversions as well.

In the language conventions test, so this is spelling, grammar, punctuation, students circle and correct spelling mistakes. they also get sentences and try to figure out, based on grammar, what may be superfluous. So, one question I was asked was, the water has penetrated through the outer layer. Which word’s not needed in the sentence?

With the answer being outer. And then finally there’s also reading. So, students read a range of different texts and then they answer comprehension questions on them. Some are literal and some ask for more deep applied inferential thinking. One of the examples again from the test I did was an article taken from the West Australian newspaper about a Kununurra man who ran a or was training to run the New York marathon.

And there was, as I mentioned, some questions that were more kind of assessing those literal skills. So where is he going to run the marathon, New York, and some are more inferential. So, like why, why did the text begin with a comment about the weather and then gave students four options and they had to choose the best one.

So, we may all have done tests like these, but really, we’re, we’re getting a pretty good snapshot of what students can do in literacy and numeracy. Thanks to these tests. Yeah, and I think it’s really interesting to know, okay, we’re asking actually quite a lot of students in those tests and particularly for the reading one, thinking about how much background knowledge they need to be able to actually understand that.

So now we know what it is and what students actually do. What are the results for 2024? Look, the NAPLAN results for 2024 confirm the sobering results from last year, so those results are on average one in three students are below proficient in literacy and numeracy. That’s a lot of tests, which came back across the country and showed that students haven’t really got a good grasp of the content that they’ve been taught in previous years of the curriculum.

And these problems are persistent, so when you look at different states and territories, about 30 percent or more of students on average across tests have fallen below the proficiency benchmark. And why should we care about proficiency? We know we have this new benchmark, but what does that actually mean?

Well, proficiency really matters because it sets kids up for life. So, when we think about the things that kids are being asked to do and that NAPLAN is assessing, that’s really important. They’re these gateway skills that will set students up for success, whether they go into a trade or in their daily life at the supermarket and beyond, or indeed into higher education at a university level.

I should mention the proficiency benchmark is attainable. The fact that 30 percent of students aren’t meeting it. Really, it’s not because the proficiency benchmark is too high. It’s because we’re letting too many struggling students fall through the gaps. Just to provide an example of that, the year nine proficiency benchmark is roughly the score achieved by the average year seven.

And when you look at these skills that students are needing to demonstrate to hit this proficiency benchmark, they’re not Particularly high-level skills and they’re the kind of skills we’d really want everyone to be able to do. That’s really useful to know. Okay, we’ve got this worrying trend. There’s about 30 percent of students that aren’t meeting that.

We also know that there are some groups that we’re really worried about and there’s these gaps. Can you tell us more about those? I sure can. So, we’ve looked a little bit into What proficiency looks like across the country. And there are some students who are struggling much more to make that proficiency benchmark.

And we kind of need to keep an eye on these cohorts. When you look at indigenous students, for example, they’re twice as likely to move short of the benchmark in remote schools as well. About 60 percent of students failed to meet the benchmark. And we also noticed some concerning patterns. Particularly for boys when it comes to literacy.

So, one thing that stood out to me was in year nine, and I know you may have reflections on this from your time teaching, but year nine boys, only about half are proficient in writing. That’s a lot of students who are struggling to communicate what they want to convey in their writing. The other thing that I noticed having taught and been in the classroom, particularly secondary, right, is there are big gaps and variation even within a class.

So, did you find that that’s common for this test as well? Yeah, and one of the really nice things about the way NAPLAN is designed is that year three, five, seven, and nine. Scores are reported on the same scale and that allows us to do some interesting things and look at how big the spread of achievement is.

So, we can compare, for example, year nine students whose parents didn’t finish high school and say, on average, this cohort of students from disadvantaged households, how are they scoring compared to students in year three or year five? And what we find is that they’re only scoring marginally above the average year five student.

So, they’re nearly four years behind in their learning in year nine. And so, for you as a secondary teacher, you’re dealing with these big gaps and that’s a real challenge. What we also see when we look at these gaps is that they’re much wider. in year nine than they are in year three. So, taking again that example of students whose parents didn’t finish high school, and comparing them to students whose parents have a bachelor’s degree or above, that gap is around two years in year three.

So, there is a gap, but that gap could be closed. By year nine, it balloons to over five years. So, it really becomes quite a vast gap that leaves students feeling like they’re, not able to achieve and struggling for that kind of academic success and on the wellbeing side, but also leaves teachers with this vast, vast range of ability that they need to try cater to.

And we really are beginning to ask the impossible of secondary teachers. Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of teachers listening out there might agree with you. I know that yeah, Grattan, you know, we’re a policy think tank. We want to know the data, but we also want to know what can we actually do about it.

And we have recently written about a reading instruction in particular. so, one thing that we’ve been fascinated by is, you know, if we look at the evidence, what we really know is actually most, most people. Almost all students can learn to read proficiently if they get the right instruction and also the right catch up supports when they’re needed.

So, when they’re early on and they have less gaps, it’s actually better to do that intervention then, but we’re not necessarily putting that evidence into practice in every single classroom in Australia, which is concerning. So, we know that in the early years, we need that systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics.

We need to build on that with a strong oral language development, read allowance in class, Reading really complex texts together as a class, explicitly building that knowledge and vocabulary for students so that they can then comprehend more texts that they come across and provide that catch up support when needed.

So, we’ve actually written a report on that. So, it was released earlier this year called Reading Guarantee. And we put together a number of different recommendations where we’re. Focused on improving that proficiency level in reading for Australian students. So, Amy, I know that you have been thinking quite a bit about like the concrete things that governments can do.

It’s quite easy to admire the problem and talk about equity, but what are the actual things that we can do to change this now? Yeah, so we actually did a big report on this. so, this is probably a plug for go away and read that report. But it was called, Reading Guarantee and we set out a six-step strategy that we’re, we want all governments to take up.

And it’s a long term, quite comprehensive strategy. So, I won’t talk about everything, but one thing I will probably talk about first is just thinking about targets because it’s quite relevant to NAPLAN. So, we think that we should be setting a long-term 90 percent target for students to meet that proficiency benchmark in reading on NAPLAN, given that we know that with the right support and right teaching, almost all students can learn to read proficiently.

We think that’s really key and that we should have an interim target on the way to that goal. So, what’s really good to see is that the federal education minister has actually asked in a new funding agreement. He wants to set a target of a 10 percent uplift in that measure by 2030. At the moment, only two states have signed up to that funding agreement.

So, WA and the Northern Territory. So, it remains to be seen what will be happening with those targets, but that’s step one of the strategies we recommended. And I noticed in that draft funding agreement that there’s also talk about, you know, how we might identify students earlier, and I was wondering what your views are on this.

Yeah. And I think it’s interesting, again, within the context of NAPLAN. So, NAPLAN, we have to wait until grade three or year three for students to get an accurate picture of how are they going in comparison with other students around the country. We think that’s too long to wait, particularly on something really important like reading.

We want to know earlier. So, we’re recommending that all governments sign up for all schools to complete the national year one 40 item phonics screening check. It’s relatively easy, efficient, and. Accurate tests to administer. So, it takes about seven minutes, just working one on one between the student and their teacher.

And it gives you a sense of how students are going on decoding. So those important foundational skills that they need to be able to read well. There are a few states that are implementing it, but they’re mostly implementing it in government schools. So, they will be able to collect that data, but they only know what’s happening in government schools.

There’s a lot of non-government schools. At the moment, Tasmania is, I suppose, leading the pack in that they have committed to rolling out the phonics screening check in their non-government schools as well. So, we’d recommend all schools are doing it and that there is for those students that don’t meet the expected level, they get that catch up support they need and re sit the test in year two.

So, we can actually tell, well, are they getting the support they need? And they’re really on the way to mastering decoding and then reading success. So, we’ve talked about two out of your six steps, and I know we won’t go into the others in detail, but are there other things that governments can be doing to broadly help shift the dial on some of these NAPLAN results?

Well, I think it comes back to that first point I made, which is what do we want to shift? We want to shift classroom practice to make sure that students are mastering the fundamentals that they need for reading. That means we need to be working with and supporting teachers and school leaders. So, there’s a need to be a big uptick in professional development, and we recommend a number of things, but one of them would be an instructional coach who’s a literacy specialist in every school.

We also recommend that teachers have access to high quality curriculum materials. They don’t have to develop it all themselves. We think there’s a role for a quality assurance body to actually suggest that. These are the ones that align with the evidence and are high quality. And it’s a really important role for governments to take in checking, you know, how are schools going and actually implementing this approach.

So, making sure they’re using school reviews to actually check how’s reading instruction going in schools. And they’re all the things that governments can do. But one thing that I’ve been thinking about is, you know, I’ve got some friends who are starting to look at finding schools for their children. I remember what it was like to bring home my own NAPLAN results.

And for some parents across the country, their child’s NAPLAN results might be the first time that they’ve seen a kind of an external standardized form of assessment on how their students tracking in school. And I’m just wondering what you would say to any parents who might be surprised by the results.

Yeah. So, I think it, I mean, it’s great that parents are paying attention. I think it is a really important assessment to do, like digging into that data and taking a look at it is really great thing for parents to do. It is one assessment and it’s one point in time. So, schools should be also doing other screening on entry assessment and then also monitoring throughout the year.

So, I want to dig into that data and maybe ask a teacher how it Square with the other results that my child’s gotten and ask them for help and support in terms of how much to worry or not worry about a maybe a surprising result. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Amy. I really appreciate you having me on.

It was, as I mentioned, it’s always a joy to talk about that plan. And I think it’s worth recognizing that there is really strong practice underway in the system. That’s schools. which are really leading the pack and have got so many students within their cohort from developing up into strong and exceeding and looking to what those schools are doing and celebrating them as important just as it is looking to those states like Tasmania, you mentioned before, who’s leading the pack on some of these reforms, like a phonics screening check.

That probably wraps us up today but thank you so much for those who listened and for your interest. You can read more, including the reading guarantee report, by heading over to our website, which is www.pearsonschools.org.au. If you’d like to reach out to us and share your thoughts on that plan, share any questions that you remember as doozies from when you did it and share your thoughts on what government should do.

You can find us on social media and join the conversation. All of Grattan’s work is freely available online and we’re supported through the generous donations of people like yourself. Thank you all again and look forward to tuning in and speaking again in the future.