NAPLAN can reveal broad patterns in literacy and numeracy, but it cannot diagnose individual student needs and too often turns disadvantage into school reputation.

In March this year, roughly 1.3 million Australian students across some 9,300 school campuses sat 4.5 million individual NAPLAN tests. Individual reports are now landing in homes, and national results are due in August. The media will soon report which states improved, which groups fell behind, and whether this year’s scores are “encouraging” or “alarming.” Politicians will promise targeted action. Schools will be compared. Then the cycle will begin again.

The more important question will remain largely unasked: after nearly two decades of NAPLAN, what has this vast testing system actually done for the student sitting in front of a teacher tomorrow morning?

I spent over 40 years in public education, the last two decades of it as a principal, and I sat with NAPLAN data every year of its existence until my retirement. My concern is not with assessment itself, it is with what NAPLAN has become: a limited instrument for monitoring literacy and numeracy that has grown into an administrative, commercial and political system increasingly shaping the education it was supposedly designed only to measure.

NAPLAN can reveal broad national and jurisdictional patterns, identify persistent inequalities between groups, and alert governments to areas needing investigation. What it cannot do is explain why an individual student struggled, distinguish between the many possible causes, or prescribe the teaching response that student needs.

A teacher’s own assessment is continuous, contextual and responsive........

© Pearls and Irritations