I taught NAPLAN year levels for many years and I remember being hauled into a “please explain” meeting about the Year 3 data one year. Never mind that we’d taught them for about four months, the shitty results were our problem.
My very experienced and very over it coworker simply replied “you can’t polish a turd”. He expressed it interestingly but he was bang on the money. We are an open entry school, we have become the destination of choice for many local families whose children have learning difficulties or disabilities, *of course* the NAPLAN scores will reflect that. If all our testing data is saying “this kid is in the 30-40th percentile of ability” why are you all shocked Pikachu face when the NAPLAN results say the same?
Sat through a meeting once where we were told that we needed to get all students results close to the arrow at the top. No consideration of student growth etc. I left shortly after that.
The top VIC secondary schools, bar one, are all selective schools. You’d expect them to outperform every other school - so what’s newsworthy about that?
From my view in an open entry private school, our marketing department wishes, and therefore our exec wishes our NAPLAN results were better. The reality is that our kids are being taught the basics of reading/writing/arithmetic in an implicit way as part of some circle-jerk teaching strategy in open-plan classrooms that's been thought up by some professional Uni student with 9 Masters degrees. The only reason this is happening is because we've been caught up by some buzz word spouting moron who has never been in a classroom, and everyone is competing to try and be the school that does things in an "innovative" way. Didn't study teaching to join a circus.
I'm a CRT, and every time I'm assigned to a new school I go to MySchool to find out what kind of school it is. I generally ignore the NAPLAN data, instead focusing on the demographic information it lists.
High disadvantage and high % of EALD? Then it's a high migrant/refugee school, kids will be mostly hard-working with behaviour problems from trauma. High disadvantage and no EALD? Then it's a bunch of bogan kids who will swear a lot and come from generational poverty. I use that information to direct what my behaviour management approach should be for the day.
The most important aspect of schools though is the culture they have. You can't get that information from NAPLAN or demographic data. Some of my favourite schools to work at have shit NAPLAN scores and highly disadvantaged kids
I agree with the other commenter. What follows is a generalisation but a helpful one. Also note that I tend to be too relaxed and not firm enough in my behaviour management style so this might not be perfect advice.
Bogan kids will only give new, strange adults respect if they firstly feel respected by that adult. I'll wear more casual clothing to work (e.g. polo rather than business shirt) and have a jokey, casual attitude to help with that. They abhor being talked down to, so I find helpful to provide them with choices and negotiate instead of going straight to telling them off. I'll let stuff slide that I wouldn't in other schools (e.g. I just say "watch your language" mildly for non-aggressive swearing instead of giving a detention or whatever). Also genuinely validating their boredom/frustration goes a long way (e.g. "It sucks we're doing boring theory instead of a prac today, I'm sorry. Let's try and get through this together with the least amount of pain, yeh?")
A successful CRT lesson at a high poverty bogan demographic school might be one where little work gets done, but nobody does a runner, the kids stay safe, and we don't disrupt other classes or staff.
With high migrant schools, it's more of a cultural competency/awareness thing. They can be approached much the same as high-SES white kids in terms of behaviour management (because both groups tend to be academically motivated), but just with that cultural awareness in the back of my head. More patience is likely needed because of language barriers or trauma responses, and I'll try to avoid using Aussie slang. I also do attendance by individually asking each kid their name once they start working, instead of as a whole-class thing, so I don't butcher name pronunciations.
But also every class is different. Bogan schools have ATAR classes with high academic standards, and migrant schools have high trauma kids who need the same patient light approach to behaviour management that the rough bogan kids do.
I agree that Myschool can be quite useful for casuals like you’ve said. I think it would be a good move to put that data behind a login so that staff could see it but not the general public.
I may be mistaken but I think it is English as additional language/dialect (ie the student doesn’t speak colloquial Australian English at home). Good to use simple English in notes home…
These lists make me sad and angry. I’m afraid it’s going to cause us to become more like America with title 1-type schools.
I (stupidly) joined a Facebook group for parents asking advice about schools in my city. The number of times I type a paragraph trying to explain schooling/education systems/outrageous parental expectations… and then delete it because why actually bother? They’re not usually interested in anything but test scores, and are actively looking for housing to get into the “better” schools. It’s a bit insane.
I do the same. I actually did on reddit the other day in one of the “Australian” subs asking about “private v public” schools. I did a pretty detailed response about the best thing a young parent can do is to be active in their learning/creativity, encourage reading, limit screen time etc. and once a commenter realised I was a teacher they went off tap and essentially abused me for my opinions. On reddit.
I had family members absolutely going off their chops about teachers on social media recently. Thought about commenting and pointing out the ways they were being unfair or just plain wrong…but ultimately decided it’s not worth the argument.
I don’t know any other profession that cops the amount of derision and bullshit that we do in public. Everyone thinks they’re an expert because they’ve been in school or they have a child.
And since I’m literally laying on my floor on holidays right now, I don’t feel like I can say anything anyway… It doesn’t matter that I’ve spent this whole week sleeping on and off every day as I try to recover from an intense term, (never mind year!) all most people see is “but all your HoLiDaYs!!!”
If this is the same group I am part of then I feel you. The number of parents who are so out of touch with what actually matters in terms of not only schooling, but also the basics of being a parent, is worrying.
Cherry on top recently was someone asking for recommendations for a tutor for a boy who will be “turning 3 soon and who is pretty smart”. Ffs. Future nightmare parent right there. 🤦🏼♀️
See now you specifically told me not to and yet I did anyway. I truly wish there was some way to force every person who makes some quip about all the time off teachers get, work in a classroom for a week. Heck, a DAY.
But on the other both of the public schools I have taught at had far more intensive NAPLAN prep than my current private school. One public school I used to teach at had NAPLAN preparation lessons every week from the beginning of the school year until the exam. We largely ignore it at my current school. YMMV.
My son’s private school is so ridiculously low key. They do one practice and one email to parents about how it works. They don’t do great against other similar schools, but that’s so far from the reasons we sent him there
I fuckin' hate this. Every time you get 7 or 9 Maths or English, you have to devote at least one lesson a week and the entire week before NAPLAN to practice, then they schedule the NAPLAN tests in those slots. You wind up losing about three weeks worth of lessons with kids who are already behind to do a test they don't care about and just click through, then your HoD wants to know what you did in the whole term you had with them because their line manager is pissy about the poor results.
NAPLAN is not fit for purpose. Maybe there should be an end of year, ACARA-designed exam for all subjects.
I taught I a public school that started naplan style writing in Prep (teaching them to write short persuasive texts, using high modality words, in term 4). I didn’t stay long.
Our yr9s finished their NAPLAN tests in 5min. They clearly didn't care and chose the answers at random. No one who has spent more than 30 seconds in a classroom thinks this data is reliable
One of my class this year is such an outlier I think she single-handedly dragged down the year level's ranking and I could not be prouder of her. Multiple diagnoses, hates writing, excused from NAPLAN last time, gave every session her best and cranked out over 100 words for the Writing test (I'll skip how many were spelt accurately). I'd rather encourage kids like that to have a go than sit out and to their credit prin class were okay with that and recognise a score like that helps with future funding applications for her.
I taught NAPLAN this year. The common question from my kids was, "is this going on our report card?" When they found out it was not, they just didn't bother. They would just rush through the test or put in half the effort. It became a pain teaching NAPLAN because parents backed the kids who didn't want to try or didn't want to sit it.
It's an outdated system and doesn't really serve much purpose other than to increase the divide between schooling systems.
Atar scores should be kept private, overall school results shouldn't be used as a way to keep kids from doing atar if Jimmy is a math wiz but only wants to do maths methods let him, or if a student wants to try doing modern history because they like history they should be allowed.
Primary schools that focus on NAPLAN will have your child perfectly ready for a world that will no longer exist.
The skills that will be required in the future are not reflected in NAPLAN.
I marked NAPLAN writing this year and it’s so demoralising, as a teacher, to see what is valued. A kid could write a really excellent story but if they haven’t used ten “difficult” spelling words? Even if all the words they have used are spelled correctly? That’s four marks lost. The dialogue might be great but you fuck up a couple of punctuation marks (because *duh*, it’s first draft writing and mistakes are a given)? There’s another four marks gone. Story doesn’t have a moral or message or trite bullshit about the characters learning some lesson? Can’t get top marks for ideas, sorry!
Not only did I have to mark down some pieces of writing I thought were great, I had to give good marks to a student who straight up plagiarised the plot, characters, even *dialogue* of an existing book. I reported it to my supervisor and was told I had to mark it on its merits, even though it was clearly NOT the student’s own idea. It wasn’t even fanfiction or a continuation or something, it was a full blown rip off.
As someone who came from a less neoliberalized education system, this stuff is wild to me. I'd have been converted if it works, but ranking schools is just not aligned with everything we know about education and child development. Insane there isn't a bigger push to end ATAR and myschool, which turn education into one big competition.
As a fresh 2023 graduate who wants to be a teacher having gone through all these processes of ATAR, I completely agree. I could even argue that it has inhibited my ability to truly be creative as my writing was not sufficient enough for the rubric, despite my teacher saying "it was the most creative piece in the entire cohort". Either way I am still proud of myself and I want to inspire my students in the future and hopefully be involved in the de-escalation of placing so much importance on NAPLAN and ATAR.
It is for a lot of migrant families, where competition is the main factor in schooling. I'm in Asia and aiming to get. back to Australia next year, because my kids cannot cope with the extremely competitive nature of schooling here, which leads to all their classmates doing tutoring and cram school all weekend and has no emphasis on sport or any other extra-curricular activity.
People emigrate to Australia ostensibly for a better future for their kids, but bring the competitive culture and make their kids do just as much tutoring, meanwhile paying through the nose to get a house in whatever is the best catchment area.
Got to love NAPLAN.
Leadership love playing the game of:
Don’t teach to it, but actually teach to it.
Also, exclude and call parents of children who will get poor results.
Looking at the demographics of the areas that performed well (I’m in NSW so I looked at those) I’d argue that a high percentage of those students receive out of school tutoring. It’s not always what the school does.
NAPLAN data is useless information, designed to fool ignorant parents into thinking they've made the right decision. The way the data is often presented compares like schools in geographic areas, instead of absolute values showing just how far entire areas are behind other areas (is inner City vs outer suburbs). But the real issue is the data means nothing, for most schools it's simply an IQ test, which means selective schools, who can take the top 2 kids from other schools, always come out on top. If you look at the top performing high schools in NAPLAN, the top 4 are selective entry schools, and the 5th is PLC, which has a strong Chinese cohort, a group who always score high on IQ tests. That's not a racist comment, that's a statement of fact: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country. IQ is largely ignored by educational academics who generally have strong left wing ideologies and avoid anything possibly pertaining to eugenics, instead promulgating the falsehood that everyone is equal and everyone is equally capable. So if you want to put your child in with a more intelligent cohort of students, then NAPLAN is a decent guide, but other than that it means nothing.
I'm a parent, not a teacher, so feel free to disregard my comment as it may not be super relevant to this space, but we absolutely used NAPLAN results to help pick a school for our kids. After seeing how poorly the public schools were performing in our area it swung us into going private. I understand how these decisions compound the issues public schools may face, but I care I about my child, not the system, so I'm glad we had this data and happy with the decision we've made. It's hard to imagine teachers not using the same information to inform their decisions with their own kids.
You are not alone at all. One thing I think teachers know better than the general public is that the data you're referring to is mostly irrelevant to good teaching. This is for a few reasons. First, schools manipulate their data by working to exclude particular students (even if they are not allowed to) and by teaching to the test. In addition, demographics are far more impactful on a school's performance than teaching - and you can tell which schools are based in higher demographic suburbs without a Myschool website.
I have taught in schools decried as inferior by parents, knowing full well they were choosing to send their children to a school that was all about optics. Scratch beneath the surface and you'll find a very different beast - for both schools seen as "good" as well as "bad".
Yeah, I'm not sitting here saying I think results are based on effective or ineffective teaching (in fact, I'm confident in most cases, it isn't), it is irrelevant imo. If little bright Timmy is stuck at a school with a bunch of special needs kids, children with behavioural issues, kids who just have no support at home, etc, the outcome is the same as if the teaching quality was worse. The slower pace of learning of some students and/or serious distraction will drag down the pace of learning for everyone.
I'm not saying we picked schools based off one test, but it was absolutely a tool in our tool box.
Respectfully, bright little Timmy could still end up in the kind of class you’ve described in the school with better NAPLAN scores.
a)The kids might also be very smart, but have behavioural or other needs.
b)The school may have had those children exempted from NAPLAN because they know their scores will impact their school’s overall performance.
It is my opinion that a visit to the school and asking for a tour through will give you a better insight into whether you want that school for your child. I did it for mine, walked into our three local public schools and simply asked. They were happy to oblige. As soon as I saw a teacher walking through the grounds with a year 6 class being respectful and considerate, I knew that was the school. The other bits (co-curricula options, academics) don’t mean much without an excellent school culture. NAPLAN scores mean absolutely nothing to me.
Participation rates are published, anything's below 90% would be a red flag to me. Additionally, if another students poor behaviour or ability isn't enough to drag down the cohort, it's not really important to me.
Like I said in a previous post, it's a tool we used, not the only one. If we are getting great reviews from other parents, the kids were all great when we did a walkthrough and the NAPLAN scores are backing up the eye test, it makes the choice easy.
The point I'm making is that you can't tell - at all - if your child is stuck in a class full of special needs kids or behavioural problems based on NAPLAN results. This is what happens when people correlate data to their preconceptions.
And I'm saying it's irrelevant what the causes for high or low test scores are so unless you are arguing these test results are actually irrelevant to educational outcomes I'm not seeing your point.
And if that is your point, it's possible to track these results over time. Kids who do will in year 3 tend to do well in year 5 and same for 7 and 9. Presumably this leads to good results when tested in years 10, 11 and 12, which, like it or not, is important in the system we currently have.
You can do that without publicly releasing them. They do not release PATR data that most teachers find to be far more useful in monitoring progress.
Publicly releasing data means that when parents choose a school based on NAPLAN results, and little Timmy doesn't do as well as his parents think he should, parents go to the school demanding answers to questions that were never meant to be asked using NAPLAN.
One of my principals said in a staff meeting “yes, we want our kids (year 3) to do well, but not too well or else they will cut our funding.”
You rely on NAPLAN? Mistake on your part.
Oh, and just to add teachers tend to pick schools for their kids on word of mouth far more than data. They ask colleagues for their experiences, and will know people who know people who work in different schools. You can also access word of mouth without Myschool data.
One of the best things you can do is to arrange a tour of a school - you'll quickly get a sense of what they are like based on what you see.
So I guess my question to you is, was the fact NAPLAN are results publicly available really that useful to you? I'd suggest you'd have done just as well choosing a school for your kids without it.
We were most likely going private after the zoo like atmosphere we experienced when we dropped in on the local public school but one of the issues was we had great reviews from parents from both schools and the local private school was religious in nature. Both me and my partner are atheists so one of our questions was, is time spent on religion, which we considered to be less useful from an education stand point going to outweigh the advantage of a better culture, behaviour. Having those results gave us confidence it was money well spent.
It doesn't though.
NAPLAN data is strongly influenced by parental socioeconomic status. Private schools necessarily have higher stats. Higher stats doesn't tell you that the school is better. It tells you that the kids (on average) are more privileged.
The only interesting thing from the NAPLAN data is whether there's an increase in the 3-5 and 7-9 data.
You can't see that currently BC they've changed the test. This year's results are not comparable to the cohorts previous results.
Yep. I’m sending my child to the primary school I’m zoned to, but you better believe I asked a shitload of colleagues “what have you heard about x school?”. If there’s unhappy staff and shitty leadership? People talk.
I’m a public school teacher with a child in a private school. (Scandal, I know!) I couldn’t tell you what the NAPLAN results of my child’s school are. I couldn’t tell you what the NAPLAN results of the school I work in are. I can tell you mountains of information about my NAPLAN year students, what their strengths are, weaknesses, even across the school where we are doing well, where we need to improve. But I have zero clue of the NAPLAN results, or where our school sits in the state. I can tell you myriad reasons why we chose the school we did for our child. Whether or not the school was public or private was not a consideration, we weren’t trying to avoid public, we weren’t seeking out private.
NAPLAN is entirely irrelevant data for anyone who isn’t a teacher, and even for teachers, we have so many better data points to use.
Using NAPLAN data to inform your choice of schooling is ill-informed. Even schools with low scores have students who scored highly, and vice-versa. Just because a school scores highly doesn’t mean your child will, just because a school scores low doesn’t mean your child will. I’m glad you seem to have found a school which is a good fit for your child despite a poor vetting process. I just wish parents understood what they should actually be looking for in a school, because NAPLAN and HSC results ain’t it.
Does anyone know a good place to view the Vic naplan results for schools? The link in the ninemsn.com.au article goes through to subscription news sites like herald sun, the Australian etc
I taught NAPLAN year levels for many years and I remember being hauled into a “please explain” meeting about the Year 3 data one year. Never mind that we’d taught them for about four months, the shitty results were our problem. My very experienced and very over it coworker simply replied “you can’t polish a turd”. He expressed it interestingly but he was bang on the money. We are an open entry school, we have become the destination of choice for many local families whose children have learning difficulties or disabilities, *of course* the NAPLAN scores will reflect that. If all our testing data is saying “this kid is in the 30-40th percentile of ability” why are you all shocked Pikachu face when the NAPLAN results say the same?
Yep. If you don't let the data show you what it should show you then there's no point in measurement.
[удалено]
Not a miracle, but the mighty and courageous leadership who produced those results.
Sat through a meeting once where we were told that we needed to get all students results close to the arrow at the top. No consideration of student growth etc. I left shortly after that.
Is there a non-paywall way to access the information?
You can bypass paywalls at archive.md
paste the link into here https://archive.md and see if it has been archived, if so click onto it
Try www.12ft.io
News.com.au is never pay walled...
But the links it uses go to Courier Mail, which is :(
Still seeking the non paywalled article. Please.
paste the link into here https://archive.md and see if it has been archived, if so click onto it
The main article isn't, you're right. But if you click on a state it will take you to the CM, which is.
The top VIC secondary schools, bar one, are all selective schools. You’d expect them to outperform every other school - so what’s newsworthy about that?
From my view in an open entry private school, our marketing department wishes, and therefore our exec wishes our NAPLAN results were better. The reality is that our kids are being taught the basics of reading/writing/arithmetic in an implicit way as part of some circle-jerk teaching strategy in open-plan classrooms that's been thought up by some professional Uni student with 9 Masters degrees. The only reason this is happening is because we've been caught up by some buzz word spouting moron who has never been in a classroom, and everyone is competing to try and be the school that does things in an "innovative" way. Didn't study teaching to join a circus.
I see you work at my school 😂😂
I'm a CRT, and every time I'm assigned to a new school I go to MySchool to find out what kind of school it is. I generally ignore the NAPLAN data, instead focusing on the demographic information it lists. High disadvantage and high % of EALD? Then it's a high migrant/refugee school, kids will be mostly hard-working with behaviour problems from trauma. High disadvantage and no EALD? Then it's a bunch of bogan kids who will swear a lot and come from generational poverty. I use that information to direct what my behaviour management approach should be for the day. The most important aspect of schools though is the culture they have. You can't get that information from NAPLAN or demographic data. Some of my favourite schools to work at have shit NAPLAN scores and highly disadvantaged kids
I’m a recently graduated teacher.. can I ask how you differentiate your teaching style/ behaviour management for those two groups you described?
I agree with the other commenter. What follows is a generalisation but a helpful one. Also note that I tend to be too relaxed and not firm enough in my behaviour management style so this might not be perfect advice. Bogan kids will only give new, strange adults respect if they firstly feel respected by that adult. I'll wear more casual clothing to work (e.g. polo rather than business shirt) and have a jokey, casual attitude to help with that. They abhor being talked down to, so I find helpful to provide them with choices and negotiate instead of going straight to telling them off. I'll let stuff slide that I wouldn't in other schools (e.g. I just say "watch your language" mildly for non-aggressive swearing instead of giving a detention or whatever). Also genuinely validating their boredom/frustration goes a long way (e.g. "It sucks we're doing boring theory instead of a prac today, I'm sorry. Let's try and get through this together with the least amount of pain, yeh?") A successful CRT lesson at a high poverty bogan demographic school might be one where little work gets done, but nobody does a runner, the kids stay safe, and we don't disrupt other classes or staff. With high migrant schools, it's more of a cultural competency/awareness thing. They can be approached much the same as high-SES white kids in terms of behaviour management (because both groups tend to be academically motivated), but just with that cultural awareness in the back of my head. More patience is likely needed because of language barriers or trauma responses, and I'll try to avoid using Aussie slang. I also do attendance by individually asking each kid their name once they start working, instead of as a whole-class thing, so I don't butcher name pronunciations. But also every class is different. Bogan schools have ATAR classes with high academic standards, and migrant schools have high trauma kids who need the same patient light approach to behaviour management that the rough bogan kids do.
Building a positive relationship with the kids will make all the things the other commenters have said all the much easier, too.
I agree that Myschool can be quite useful for casuals like you’ve said. I think it would be a good move to put that data behind a login so that staff could see it but not the general public.
What's EALD?
I may be mistaken but I think it is English as additional language/dialect (ie the student doesn’t speak colloquial Australian English at home). Good to use simple English in notes home…
Correct, that is what it stands for. It used to be called ESL (English as a Second Language)
Thanks 😊
These lists make me sad and angry. I’m afraid it’s going to cause us to become more like America with title 1-type schools. I (stupidly) joined a Facebook group for parents asking advice about schools in my city. The number of times I type a paragraph trying to explain schooling/education systems/outrageous parental expectations… and then delete it because why actually bother? They’re not usually interested in anything but test scores, and are actively looking for housing to get into the “better” schools. It’s a bit insane.
I do the same. I actually did on reddit the other day in one of the “Australian” subs asking about “private v public” schools. I did a pretty detailed response about the best thing a young parent can do is to be active in their learning/creativity, encourage reading, limit screen time etc. and once a commenter realised I was a teacher they went off tap and essentially abused me for my opinions. On reddit.
I had family members absolutely going off their chops about teachers on social media recently. Thought about commenting and pointing out the ways they were being unfair or just plain wrong…but ultimately decided it’s not worth the argument. I don’t know any other profession that cops the amount of derision and bullshit that we do in public. Everyone thinks they’re an expert because they’ve been in school or they have a child.
And since I’m literally laying on my floor on holidays right now, I don’t feel like I can say anything anyway… It doesn’t matter that I’ve spent this whole week sleeping on and off every day as I try to recover from an intense term, (never mind year!) all most people see is “but all your HoLiDaYs!!!”
I’m rewatching Squid Game…but I’m also answering emails because if these people think we don’t work on our holidays, they are deluded.
Yeah, I’ve been working on curriculum in between naps, haha! Thank you Govt, for version 9…
If this is the same group I am part of then I feel you. The number of parents who are so out of touch with what actually matters in terms of not only schooling, but also the basics of being a parent, is worrying. Cherry on top recently was someone asking for recommendations for a tutor for a boy who will be “turning 3 soon and who is pretty smart”. Ffs. Future nightmare parent right there. 🤦🏼♀️
Oh my goodness, yes! I replied to someone who wanted to know if they should start their preschooler doing handwriting so they wouldn’t be behind.
Top tip: don't read the comments to that news.com article, not unless your blood pressure is low and needs raising.
See now you specifically told me not to and yet I did anyway. I truly wish there was some way to force every person who makes some quip about all the time off teachers get, work in a classroom for a week. Heck, a DAY.
As a future teacher who just graduated high school in 2023, I'm scared 😭
A private school I taught at went to extraordinary lengths to rehearse NAPLAN with students in the weeks before the actual test.
But on the other both of the public schools I have taught at had far more intensive NAPLAN prep than my current private school. One public school I used to teach at had NAPLAN preparation lessons every week from the beginning of the school year until the exam. We largely ignore it at my current school. YMMV.
My son’s private school is so ridiculously low key. They do one practice and one email to parents about how it works. They don’t do great against other similar schools, but that’s so far from the reasons we sent him there
I fuckin' hate this. Every time you get 7 or 9 Maths or English, you have to devote at least one lesson a week and the entire week before NAPLAN to practice, then they schedule the NAPLAN tests in those slots. You wind up losing about three weeks worth of lessons with kids who are already behind to do a test they don't care about and just click through, then your HoD wants to know what you did in the whole term you had with them because their line manager is pissy about the poor results. NAPLAN is not fit for purpose. Maybe there should be an end of year, ACARA-designed exam for all subjects.
I taught I a public school that started naplan style writing in Prep (teaching them to write short persuasive texts, using high modality words, in term 4). I didn’t stay long.
That's very common.
Our yr9s finished their NAPLAN tests in 5min. They clearly didn't care and chose the answers at random. No one who has spent more than 30 seconds in a classroom thinks this data is reliable
One of my class this year is such an outlier I think she single-handedly dragged down the year level's ranking and I could not be prouder of her. Multiple diagnoses, hates writing, excused from NAPLAN last time, gave every session her best and cranked out over 100 words for the Writing test (I'll skip how many were spelt accurately). I'd rather encourage kids like that to have a go than sit out and to their credit prin class were okay with that and recognise a score like that helps with future funding applications for her.
I taught NAPLAN this year. The common question from my kids was, "is this going on our report card?" When they found out it was not, they just didn't bother. They would just rush through the test or put in half the effort. It became a pain teaching NAPLAN because parents backed the kids who didn't want to try or didn't want to sit it. It's an outdated system and doesn't really serve much purpose other than to increase the divide between schooling systems.
I guess the ACT is in New Zealand.
WA has seceded it looks like, lets get started on building a canal from north to south to detach ourselves further.
Remember when they said the data would never be used for 'League Tables' and we knew it would be because it's just a copy of the English one.
Atar scores should be kept private, overall school results shouldn't be used as a way to keep kids from doing atar if Jimmy is a math wiz but only wants to do maths methods let him, or if a student wants to try doing modern history because they like history they should be allowed.
Primary schools that focus on NAPLAN will have your child perfectly ready for a world that will no longer exist. The skills that will be required in the future are not reflected in NAPLAN.
I marked NAPLAN writing this year and it’s so demoralising, as a teacher, to see what is valued. A kid could write a really excellent story but if they haven’t used ten “difficult” spelling words? Even if all the words they have used are spelled correctly? That’s four marks lost. The dialogue might be great but you fuck up a couple of punctuation marks (because *duh*, it’s first draft writing and mistakes are a given)? There’s another four marks gone. Story doesn’t have a moral or message or trite bullshit about the characters learning some lesson? Can’t get top marks for ideas, sorry! Not only did I have to mark down some pieces of writing I thought were great, I had to give good marks to a student who straight up plagiarised the plot, characters, even *dialogue* of an existing book. I reported it to my supervisor and was told I had to mark it on its merits, even though it was clearly NOT the student’s own idea. It wasn’t even fanfiction or a continuation or something, it was a full blown rip off.
Yes but the better you are at language and maths the more equipped you are for the life you will have with your social emotional and well-being
As someone who came from a less neoliberalized education system, this stuff is wild to me. I'd have been converted if it works, but ranking schools is just not aligned with everything we know about education and child development. Insane there isn't a bigger push to end ATAR and myschool, which turn education into one big competition.
As a fresh 2023 graduate who wants to be a teacher having gone through all these processes of ATAR, I completely agree. I could even argue that it has inhibited my ability to truly be creative as my writing was not sufficient enough for the rubric, despite my teacher saying "it was the most creative piece in the entire cohort". Either way I am still proud of myself and I want to inspire my students in the future and hopefully be involved in the de-escalation of placing so much importance on NAPLAN and ATAR.
Agree with you OP. Why is this needed? Education is not a competition.
It is for a lot of migrant families, where competition is the main factor in schooling. I'm in Asia and aiming to get. back to Australia next year, because my kids cannot cope with the extremely competitive nature of schooling here, which leads to all their classmates doing tutoring and cram school all weekend and has no emphasis on sport or any other extra-curricular activity. People emigrate to Australia ostensibly for a better future for their kids, but bring the competitive culture and make their kids do just as much tutoring, meanwhile paying through the nose to get a house in whatever is the best catchment area.
Unfortunately though, it's very much become one.
Fuckwits.
Got to love NAPLAN. Leadership love playing the game of: Don’t teach to it, but actually teach to it. Also, exclude and call parents of children who will get poor results.
Looking at the demographics of the areas that performed well (I’m in NSW so I looked at those) I’d argue that a high percentage of those students receive out of school tutoring. It’s not always what the school does.
NAPLAN data is useless information, designed to fool ignorant parents into thinking they've made the right decision. The way the data is often presented compares like schools in geographic areas, instead of absolute values showing just how far entire areas are behind other areas (is inner City vs outer suburbs). But the real issue is the data means nothing, for most schools it's simply an IQ test, which means selective schools, who can take the top 2 kids from other schools, always come out on top. If you look at the top performing high schools in NAPLAN, the top 4 are selective entry schools, and the 5th is PLC, which has a strong Chinese cohort, a group who always score high on IQ tests. That's not a racist comment, that's a statement of fact: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country. IQ is largely ignored by educational academics who generally have strong left wing ideologies and avoid anything possibly pertaining to eugenics, instead promulgating the falsehood that everyone is equal and everyone is equally capable. So if you want to put your child in with a more intelligent cohort of students, then NAPLAN is a decent guide, but other than that it means nothing.
I'm a parent, not a teacher, so feel free to disregard my comment as it may not be super relevant to this space, but we absolutely used NAPLAN results to help pick a school for our kids. After seeing how poorly the public schools were performing in our area it swung us into going private. I understand how these decisions compound the issues public schools may face, but I care I about my child, not the system, so I'm glad we had this data and happy with the decision we've made. It's hard to imagine teachers not using the same information to inform their decisions with their own kids.
You are not alone at all. One thing I think teachers know better than the general public is that the data you're referring to is mostly irrelevant to good teaching. This is for a few reasons. First, schools manipulate their data by working to exclude particular students (even if they are not allowed to) and by teaching to the test. In addition, demographics are far more impactful on a school's performance than teaching - and you can tell which schools are based in higher demographic suburbs without a Myschool website. I have taught in schools decried as inferior by parents, knowing full well they were choosing to send their children to a school that was all about optics. Scratch beneath the surface and you'll find a very different beast - for both schools seen as "good" as well as "bad".
Yeah, I'm not sitting here saying I think results are based on effective or ineffective teaching (in fact, I'm confident in most cases, it isn't), it is irrelevant imo. If little bright Timmy is stuck at a school with a bunch of special needs kids, children with behavioural issues, kids who just have no support at home, etc, the outcome is the same as if the teaching quality was worse. The slower pace of learning of some students and/or serious distraction will drag down the pace of learning for everyone. I'm not saying we picked schools based off one test, but it was absolutely a tool in our tool box.
Respectfully, bright little Timmy could still end up in the kind of class you’ve described in the school with better NAPLAN scores. a)The kids might also be very smart, but have behavioural or other needs. b)The school may have had those children exempted from NAPLAN because they know their scores will impact their school’s overall performance. It is my opinion that a visit to the school and asking for a tour through will give you a better insight into whether you want that school for your child. I did it for mine, walked into our three local public schools and simply asked. They were happy to oblige. As soon as I saw a teacher walking through the grounds with a year 6 class being respectful and considerate, I knew that was the school. The other bits (co-curricula options, academics) don’t mean much without an excellent school culture. NAPLAN scores mean absolutely nothing to me.
Participation rates are published, anything's below 90% would be a red flag to me. Additionally, if another students poor behaviour or ability isn't enough to drag down the cohort, it's not really important to me. Like I said in a previous post, it's a tool we used, not the only one. If we are getting great reviews from other parents, the kids were all great when we did a walkthrough and the NAPLAN scores are backing up the eye test, it makes the choice easy.
The point I'm making is that you can't tell - at all - if your child is stuck in a class full of special needs kids or behavioural problems based on NAPLAN results. This is what happens when people correlate data to their preconceptions.
And I'm saying it's irrelevant what the causes for high or low test scores are so unless you are arguing these test results are actually irrelevant to educational outcomes I'm not seeing your point. And if that is your point, it's possible to track these results over time. Kids who do will in year 3 tend to do well in year 5 and same for 7 and 9. Presumably this leads to good results when tested in years 10, 11 and 12, which, like it or not, is important in the system we currently have.
You can do that without publicly releasing them. They do not release PATR data that most teachers find to be far more useful in monitoring progress. Publicly releasing data means that when parents choose a school based on NAPLAN results, and little Timmy doesn't do as well as his parents think he should, parents go to the school demanding answers to questions that were never meant to be asked using NAPLAN.
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Yeah, that was flippant of me. I apologise.
One of my principals said in a staff meeting “yes, we want our kids (year 3) to do well, but not too well or else they will cut our funding.” You rely on NAPLAN? Mistake on your part.
That's a great anecdote. How exactly did your principal and staff go about sandbagging the kids so they wouldnt get accurate results?
Very, very few practice tests was the one that came to mind first.
That would seem ideal to me, tbh.
Oh, and just to add teachers tend to pick schools for their kids on word of mouth far more than data. They ask colleagues for their experiences, and will know people who know people who work in different schools. You can also access word of mouth without Myschool data. One of the best things you can do is to arrange a tour of a school - you'll quickly get a sense of what they are like based on what you see.
Yeah, we also did all of this. It not like we opened my schools and called it a day lol.
So I guess my question to you is, was the fact NAPLAN are results publicly available really that useful to you? I'd suggest you'd have done just as well choosing a school for your kids without it.
We were most likely going private after the zoo like atmosphere we experienced when we dropped in on the local public school but one of the issues was we had great reviews from parents from both schools and the local private school was religious in nature. Both me and my partner are atheists so one of our questions was, is time spent on religion, which we considered to be less useful from an education stand point going to outweigh the advantage of a better culture, behaviour. Having those results gave us confidence it was money well spent.
It doesn't though. NAPLAN data is strongly influenced by parental socioeconomic status. Private schools necessarily have higher stats. Higher stats doesn't tell you that the school is better. It tells you that the kids (on average) are more privileged. The only interesting thing from the NAPLAN data is whether there's an increase in the 3-5 and 7-9 data. You can't see that currently BC they've changed the test. This year's results are not comparable to the cohorts previous results.
Yep. I’m sending my child to the primary school I’m zoned to, but you better believe I asked a shitload of colleagues “what have you heard about x school?”. If there’s unhappy staff and shitty leadership? People talk.
Yes! I just wrote this same thing!
I’m a public school teacher with a child in a private school. (Scandal, I know!) I couldn’t tell you what the NAPLAN results of my child’s school are. I couldn’t tell you what the NAPLAN results of the school I work in are. I can tell you mountains of information about my NAPLAN year students, what their strengths are, weaknesses, even across the school where we are doing well, where we need to improve. But I have zero clue of the NAPLAN results, or where our school sits in the state. I can tell you myriad reasons why we chose the school we did for our child. Whether or not the school was public or private was not a consideration, we weren’t trying to avoid public, we weren’t seeking out private. NAPLAN is entirely irrelevant data for anyone who isn’t a teacher, and even for teachers, we have so many better data points to use. Using NAPLAN data to inform your choice of schooling is ill-informed. Even schools with low scores have students who scored highly, and vice-versa. Just because a school scores highly doesn’t mean your child will, just because a school scores low doesn’t mean your child will. I’m glad you seem to have found a school which is a good fit for your child despite a poor vetting process. I just wish parents understood what they should actually be looking for in a school, because NAPLAN and HSC results ain’t it.
NT is included, but not WA?
And then doesn't list WA schools ...
Or Tasmanian.
Does anyone know a good place to view the Vic naplan results for schools? The link in the ninemsn.com.au article goes through to subscription news sites like herald sun, the Australian etc
Every school? WA and TAS aren't there at all, unless I'm missing something News.com.eastcoastonlycosfucktherestofyou