Lifting NAPLAN results: what happens in the classroom matters most

Every year, the national release of NAPLAN results triggers a barrage of commentary and soul-searching around the state of education and how well it serves the next generation of Australians.

This year’s data confirm what we learned last year when a new scoring system and set of bands was implemented.  About a third of students lack proficiency across the various domains and year levels. About one in 10 students score in the lowest band (Needs Additional Support), intended to indicate to teachers and parents that these students are at serious risk of education failure unless they’re given additional support.

However, those figures are averages. The proportion of students deemed not proficient will vary across schools and regions, and students’ backgrounds. Students who are male, have parents with lower levels of education, live further away from a major city or are Indigenous are far more likely to be in these bottom two bands.

It’s disappointing that despite substantial political investment alongside enormous financial investment — $319 billion from 2018 to 2029 — such stark achievement gaps persist.

It’s all too easy to throw up our hands and say what is needed is yet more money, or — rarely voiced out loud — for the students to just be different. Easy, but unhelpful.

Thankfully, more and more Australian schools are taking matters into their own hands and embracing high-quality teaching practices based on research and evidence. If you read a news story about how a school has ‘turned around’ its results — and reaped the benefits of more engaged and more capable students — you will probably find some combination of structured literacy, a knowledge-rich curriculum and explicit teaching.

Structured literacy involves explicitly teaching students the building blocks of early reading: phonics, phonemic awareness, oral language, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency. As students move into middle primary, they can not only read to learn new things, but derive meaning and pleasure from the ever-increasing variety of texts and genres they are able to access.

A knowledge-rich curriculum across the school years also contributes to wider forms of literacy. This prioritises identifying the key knowledge students require to participate and thrive in the real world, then breaking it down, sequencing it and building student knowledge gradually. It’s this knowledge that is the foundation of skills like critical thinking and creativity.

We can’t get students to ‘think critically’ about the claims made in a newspaper article, a viral TikTok video or a politician’s speech unless they know something about the topic. A curriculum focused on the knowledge required to be culturally literate is vital to a vibrant and active social and civic sphere.

Explicit teaching — whether it’s Barak Rosenshine’s direct instruction or Hollingsworth and Ybarra’s explicit direct instruction — is backed by decades of evidence as the most effective and efficient way to ensure all students attain knowledge and skills.

Explicit teaching is not just when teachers explain something for the first few minutes of the lesson before letting students ‘have a go’ — which often results in needing to explain the same thing a dozen times as students become more disengaged and distracted.

Instead, it’s a highly responsive framework involving modelling, worked examples and checking for student understanding prior to releasing responsibility to the students. Knowledge and skills are broken into small pieces and practised — and students experience success before moving on to independent work and the next step in their learning.

Not only have these strategies been vindicated by research and evidence, they also align with the scientific evidence of how human brains learn. The science of learning emphasises our need to be taught knowledge and skills that are ‘biologically secondary’, and how to work around the bottleneck of our limited working memory to cement learning in our long-term memory.

All these approaches to teaching have one other important feature in common: they do not leave education success up to chance, and the educational resources students might happen to benefit from at home.

What all students need to learn — explanations, examples and demonstrations — is carefully planned behind the scenes by teachers, before they even set foot in the classroom. During the lesson, teachers check to see what students have grasped from what has been taught, and respond appropriately if they are struggling. Students are constantly responding to a variety of questions before the teacher releases responsibility. They are not left, with minimal guidance, to make sense of their learning using their own background knowledge — a strategy that inevitably rewards the haves over the have-nots.

Policymakers are, slowly but steadily, realising that what matters most in education is the practice in the classroom. Their job is to then use their authority and resources to support all teachers in all schools to meet the learning needs of all students.

A great deal of progress has been made with early literacy instruction, and the nation’s two biggest school systems in New South Wales and Victoria are embracing explicit instruction — with the curriculum and lesson resourcing to support this shift.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has also put $16 billion of additional federal funding for schools on the table, on the condition that states embrace universal early screening in literacy and numeracy, and provide support to schools to implement interventions when screening shows students are at risk.

But systems that jump to fixing intervention — Tier 2 and 3 support — are putting the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Investing in universal supports, around whole-class teaching and assessment, should be the priority. Systems also have the scale power to conduct desktop and field research to find out which screening tools and which intervention programs are most effective, and provide guidance about this to schools.

Students’ backgrounds undoubtedly influence their future, but that need not be the deciding factor for their success or failure. If policymakers and educators work together, they can improve outcomes where it matters most: for the students.

Trisha Jha is an education research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and a former high school teacher.