NSW education minister Rob Stokes says Naplan has become a tool to rank schools

Simon Birmingham has rejected a call from the New South Wales government to urgently scrap Naplan tests.

On Friday the NSW education minister, Rob Stokes, used the second Gonski review into educational excellence to call for Naplan to be replaced with smaller, more regular and low-key tests.

But Birmingham, the federal education minister, told Radio National Naplan testing “serves a very important purpose for many Australian parents”.

“Parents make clear they want to see how their children are progressing, they want to know whether their children are learning the basics of literacy and numeracy that Naplan assesses,” he said on Friday.

Stokes will make his case at a meeting of education ministers in Adelaide on Friday at which the review panel’s chair, David Gonski, will present the findings of the report.

The Gonski review found Naplan provided “a useful big-picture view of student learning trends across Australia”.

But it warned of “limitations at the classroom level” because it reports “achievement rather than growth”, the results are six months old by the time they are released and the test is administered only in years 3, 5, 7 and 9.

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In comments to Fairfax Media, Stokes said Naplan and the results published on the MySchool website had become a rating tool rather than a measurement of student progress. “I am all for transparency but this is not transparency – this is actually dishonesty,” he was quoted as saying.



“You now have an industry that’s grown up alongside it, where teachers are being encouraged to teach to the test rather than the curriculum. It’s become a vehicle for edu businesses to extort money out of desperate students and their family.



“When you now have private schools marketing their Naplan success, that points to the failure of Naplan, and it’s time we had discussions about replacing it.”

Naplan has come under scrutiny in part owing to a sustained campaign from the NSW Teachers Federation, which commissioned a report from the academic Les Perelman that concluded that the Naplan writing test was “bizarre” and rewarded students for using big words rather than clear expression.

State and territory education ministers had already agreed to draft terms of reference to review Naplan, with the Australian Capital Territory leading a charge to reform the test.

The ACT education minister, Yvette Berry, told Guardian Australia she had “held concerns for some time that the high-stakes culture around Naplan may be doing more harm than good”.

“In the ACT we see the current school-level reporting on MySchool as contributing to the league table culture and to residualisation and inequity in some schools,” she said.

“Naplan’s high stakes culture is also causing unfair stress and anxiety for students and is likely to be working against the overall school improvement we all want to see.”

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The secretary of the NSW Teachers Federation, Maurie Mulheron, said it was good that Stokes had listened to widespread concerns about the “very crude, blunt” Naplan test.

“We need to replace it with a sophisticated assessment regime – one that teachers can write, develop and manage,” he said.

Stokes reportedly said NSW would pull out of the test if Naplan was not tied to federal funding. “I’m not saying standardised tests are not important but we can do them better.”

He has called for smaller, more regular and low-key tests that can dynamically respond to children’s ability and highlight areas for improvement.

The Gonski review called for the curriculum to be broken up into smaller progressions that form the basis for students’ individual learning plans. It also suggested the development of an online tool to assess skills, measure improvements and recommend ways to fix gaps in students’ skills.

Birmingham said Naplan would enable the types of testing that the Gonski review recommended.

He acknowledged that principals and teachers were concerned about “some of the reporting that’s attached to Naplan”. He noted the review of the standardised tests and said the federal government was open to ensuring Naplan results were “reported in a better way”.

Mulheron warned the government against tying the Naplan test to federal funding of schools, saying any attempt at “coercive federalism” was “unacceptable and will be ultimately unsuccessful”.