Does the NAPLAN actually matter?

What is the NAPLAN? 

The NAPLAN is an acronym for the “National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy”. NAPLAN is a national assessment for all students in Years 3, 5, 7, 9 which involves tests in reading, writing, language conventions (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and numeracy. These are compulsory examinations which are undertaken by all of Australia. As the NAPLAN is targeted towards the average student, it is typically of easier difficulty. In comparison the Selective Schools Test is specialised for each individual state and targeted towards high achieving students. It is hence more difficult.

What is the NAPLAN used for?

More than anything else, the NAPLAN test provides a measure for governments, education authorities, schools, teachers and parents to determine whether their students demonstrate literacy and numeracy skills at a baseline national Australian standard. This information also allows governments to assess how well different schools are performing and the effectiveness of their education programs.

The test is not designed to assess which students have higher abilities or academic potential. Rather it wants to see if students can demonstrate the basic skills they have learned over the school curriculum and compare their performance against other schools.

Are the marks important and what do they mean?

In NAPLAN examinations, there are no pass or fail mark. The marks and exams themselves are conducted simply to give students, parents and schools a way to compare their student’s performance to other students across the country.

Therefore, ultimately the marks themselves cannot be and are not used towards any school selection process such as the OC or Selective Test although some schools have admitted that they use the NAPLAN results to allocate school marks since they did not put in the effort to give standardised tests at the end of Year 5.  

However, some private schools are known to use students’ NAPLAN results in conjunction with school reports and scholarship tests to help determine who receives scholarships. Overall, the actual scholarship test however, is still much, much more important in this process. The NAPLAN results are typically only looked at to see if the student has acquired the bare basic skills taught at school.

Ultimately the NAPLAN is not a test with big consequences or benefits, but it can be an effective indicator of a student’s academic standing compared to other students around the nation. As a result, students who are looking to excel in the OC and Selective exams should be scoring in the top bands across most of their subjects in the NAPLAN.

Published 15th May 2019, last edited 17th February 2022