Improve learning outcomes – take NAPLAN seriously

The latest NAPLAN data set highlights the urgent need for the education system to set ambitious improvement targets to improve student outcomes. This year’s NAPLAN results, released yesterday, indicate that student achievement levels are stable, but there is no clear evidence of improvement.

This aligns with other indications of a stagnation, but not a reversal, in the trend of poor or declining education outcomes.

Over the past two decades, Australian student performance in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has shown some of the steepest and most consistent declines globally.

The most recent PISA results, published late last year, showed little change. Similarly, NAPLAN scores have generally remained flat for over 15 years.

However, stagnant outcomes are not a sign of success in the education system. Beyond the lack of overall improvement, there is little evidence of reduced achievement gaps for disadvantaged students, or progress in helping those who fall behind to catch up.

This is a disappointing legacy, but not surprising, given the unfortunate reality that too many in the sector have not prioritised education outcomes.

First, the focus for many has primarily been on the level and distribution of resources going into the system.

The fallacy that increased funding alone would lead to improved achievement has always been misleading and cynical. More than a decade of Gonski funding, aimed at improving achievement and reducing gaps, has had minimal impact on outcomes.

Yet, spats over resources continue to dominate policy discussion. Education ministers are currently haggling over the funding split between Canberra and the states, despite substantial additional federal funding already being offered — and Australia’s school funding increases being among the highest in the developed world for most of the past two decades

Second, education ministers and unions have preferred to undermine or abandon NAPLAN rather focus on improving success.

Some have attempted to review NAPLAN out of existence. But it has withstood multiple independent reviews — each confirming its value as a crucial assessment of foundational literacy and numeracy.

Many school systems envy the nationally-consistent and easily-interpretable benchmark that NAPLAN provides. Despite its imperfections, NAPLAN become a better and more useful instrument for schools in recent years.

Yet, unions have consistently opposed standardised testing in general and NAPLAN (including the MySchool website that publicly reports schools’ NAPLAN results) in particular. This unproductive and adversarial approach — such as instructing union members to boycott the test — seems a shift away from supporting the sector, opting instead to obscure poor outcomes rather than address them.

Improving learning outcomes will be impossible as long as NAPLAN — the most reliable and widely available indicator — is not taken seriously. Therefore, policymakers must make enhancing education outcomes an explicit priority. Any school system committed to improvement starts by setting clear targets, and high-performing systems achieve success by actively managing outcomes rather than leaving them to chance. System targets for NAPLAN should be ambitious and concentrate on benchmarking improvements in how systems ensure students catch up, keep up, and move up in NAPLAN proficiency levels.

To its credit, the federal government has set modest improvement targets in NAPLAN in its new funding agreements with the states, which will be negotiated and finalised in the coming months. This follows two reviews over the past few years — one from the Productivity Commission and another from an expert panel —that outlined potential outcome measures for setting system targets.

However, state education systems don’t have a strong track record in effectively measuring outcomes. Most rely on vague and woolly goals that often lack relevance to student achievement. In others, outcomes measurement has actually regressed. In NSW, the government recently ditched — as a “workload reduction” measure — the School Success Model that provided public schools with general targets, support to reach them, and state-wide achievement goals.

NAPLAN is one of the most valuable assets of Australia’s education system. Policymakers must show they too value it by using it as an evaluation benchmark.

Education improvements can only begin once ambitious and transparent targets are set.

Glenn Fahey is  education program director at the Centre for Independent Studies.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko.