Quitting NAPLAN would be a fail for Australian education

Australia’s education system would be worse off without NAPLAN. Yet a new report proposes replacing the standardised, national assessment with an array of teacher-selected ones.

That’s despite multiple independent reviews consistently handing down recommendations to keep, but continually develop, the national assessment. Successive reports have confirmed NAPLAN is highly valued by educators and parents alike.

But detractors lean on several misconceptions to prop up their opposition. They claim it’s not holistic enough, encourages narrow “teaching to the test”, undermines trust in teachers’ work, and places undue stress on students.

This is conscious bias rather than constructive criticism. Not only has Canberra, along with all states and territories, repeatedly affirmed that NAPLAN’s here to stay, but the oft-cited concerns don’t add up.

NAPLAN isn’t holistic by definition and design; it’s intentionally a barometer on foundational literacy and numeracy.

The explicit time commitment is minimal, both in preparation and carrying it out. Far from impairing teachers’ work, it’s a useful tool to assist them. And, by and large, it’s not the children who are stressed and anxious about NAPLAN, but the adults around them.

Teachers, parents, principals – and, most importantly, students – would be worse off if the NAPLAN assaults aren’t rebuffed.

Replacing the nationally consistent and comparable assessments with teacher-selected ones would mean less-reliable diagnostics for educators and poorer information available to parents.

Teachers are generally skilled in diagnosing students’ needs through regular classroom activities. But research also shows that subjective observations of students’ competency can be at odds with what’s revealed by independent, objective assessment.

We need NAPLAN as a supplement to the daily work of educators and to validate their professional judgments, not substitute for them.

While not all parents rely on the MySchool website in school decision-making, research by the Centre for Independent Studies shows those who do are more confident and satisfied with their chosen school.

Despite regular hysteria about parents using the website for “school shopping”, a review into NAPLAN reporting showed there have been virtually no episodes of any adverse effects from MySchool.

Without NAPLAN, principals would lose a key tool for benchmarking against similar schools, thwarting school improvement efforts. Without an externally valid measure, few principals would be able to confidently gauge whether performance is improving or not.

And evidence suggests overall student achievement would also be a casualty.

OECD research shows more transparent school systems perform better than those that are less transparent. Competition between schools – even between students – is largely a force for good, not something our school system should shun.

It’s true NAPLAN isn’t perfect; no test is. But continued testing and reporting improvements are making it a better tool every year.

With NAPLAN moving online, testing is timelier and produces a more detailed diagnostic of student achievement.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority has been tasked with solving legitimate concerns with the NAPLAN writing assessment, which will ultimately boost confidence in the test.

And the MySchool website is now more informative and useful for parents and schools to make suitable school comparisons and decisions.

NAPLAN alone is no silver bullet for our education system’s woes. Student achievement in NAPLAN has been mixed since it was first introduced in 2008. But quitting the test in protest that the results haven’t improved is nonsensical – you wouldn’t toss out a barometer for reporting bad weather.

NAPLAN and the accompanying MySchool website are assets for our school system. We must preserve and further improve the national assessment so that every child is tracked along a common scale, every parent is informed about their child’s progress and their school’s performance, and every school can benchmark against peers.

It’s high time NAPLAN’s opponents put down their weapons and became part of the solution, rather than the problems, in Australia’s school system.