From tomorrow, more than a million school students across Australia will complete the annual NAPLAN assessments.
Many parents are not particularly happy about this. Some worry the tests are stressful or that they are too narrow to measure all of the things we care about in education.
My message to those parents is: don’t lose sight of the big benefits NAPLAN offers your children, and families and teachers across Australia.
This is especially true for Victorian students this year, following last year’s lengthy COVID lockdowns. Unfortunately, many students fell behind while trying to learn from home. Getting a reliable picture of this loss is essential if we want to turn things around.
NAPLAN tests the literacy and numeracy skills of students in Years 3, 5, 7, and 9. It doesn’t test everything a child knows, so it can’t tell the full story of a child’s education. But it does provide a snapshot of how children are going in areas key to opening up their future opportunities.
Teachers can target their teaching more effectively when they know where children are starting from. NAPLAN tests can also help identify students who are really struggling.
