Teachers union slams NAPLAN after results released

However, questions remain over the usefulness of tests like NAPLAN as a curriculum building and assessment tool.

"Public school teachers, principals and education support staff don't need NAPLAN to know that students and school communities in regional Australia face greater challenges than city areas," Australian Education Union (AEU) federal president Correna Haythorpe told ACM.

Regional, rural and remote schools face greater workforce shortages, limited access to specialist teachers, and more students who experience disadvantage, she said.

"NAPLAN is an inappropriate testing system that has been shown to offer poor insights into the educational needs and achievements of students," she said.

Kids around the country take NAPLAN tests in Years Three, Five, Seven and Nine to test literacy and numeracy skills.

The 2022 school test results, released on February 22, are available here as a searchable database.

"Regional and rural students often face challenges in their schooling relative to their peers in metropolitan areas," ACU Institute for learning sciences and teacher education senior research fellow Dr Steven Lewis told ACM.

"This reflects that schools in rural and regional areas often serve students drawn from lower socio-economic populations, or else have higher proportions of students with diverse learning needs," he said.

NAPLAN tests are "strongly influenced" by student advantage and disadvantage, Dr Lewis said.

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The National Assessment Program uses these results to give the government, parents and teachers a measure of literacy and numeracy skills for Australian students, and to make decisions about future curricula.

The federal department of education referred ACM to comments education minister Jason Clare made this week: "We've got a good education system, but it can be a lot better and a lot fairer".

"The heart of the matter is this: if you're a child from a poor background or from the bush, you're less likely to go to preschool, you're more likely to fall behind at primary school, you're less likely to finish high school and less likely to go on to university, that's the awful truth of it," he said.

"What this also tells us is that if you're a child from a poor background or from the bush, and you go to a school where there's lots of children from a poor background, it's harder to catch up," he said.

"There are some key factors in a student's family background, like the parents' occupation, school education and non-school education, which have an influence on students' educational outcomes at school and on NAPLAN results," an Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) spokesperson told ACM.

"By controlling for socio-educational advantage, ACARA can identify those schools that are punching above their socio-educational weight and ensure that NAPLAN is a measure of ability as well as advantage," the spokesperson said.

"The NAPLAN tests support monitoring and evaluating of the performance of schools and school systems and, importantly, provide schools, states and territories with information about how education approaches are working, areas to be prioritised for improvement, and those schools requiring support in the teaching and learning of literacy and numeracy," the spokesperson said.

"For governments, NAPLAN data can inform priority areas for resourcing so that funds can be directed to where they are most needed," the spokesperson said.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced students and teachers around the country to embrace online technology like never before in the school setting.

Teachers have effectively and ingeniously used technology to guide under-resourced children through the pandemic and now with face-to-face teaching, La Trobe senior lecturer in learning design Dr Stefan Schutt told ACM.

"The ways teachers right around the country transformed their practice in such a short time, and with such success, is a testament to their skills, care and ability to adapt - this is not always given the kudos it deserves," he said.

"So many of the positive results from around Australia have come from relatively under-resourced schools working in disadvantaged communities," he said.