A Queensland principal whose school has less than two per cent of students sitting NAPLAN insists he did not actively encourage the boycott, but says young people are already suffering extreme stress.

Only six out of 320 eligible students at Kimberley College in Logan, south of Brisbane, are taking part in the annual numeracy and literary assessment today for children in years 3, 5, 7 and 9.

Principal Paul Thompson said parents knew they could withdraw their children from the testing on philosophical or religious grounds.

"The parents have decided, without my urging, to withdraw their children," he said.

"I don't have to sell it and I don't have to turn parents away from it.

'They're only too pleased not to have their children sit the NAPLAN test."

He said NAPLAN puts too much stress on students for no good cause.

"There's an enormous elephant in the lounge room," he said.

Year 3s doing Naplan at East Brisbane State School, where there is a 100 per cent attendance rate. ( ABC News: Lexy Hamilton-Smith )

"This country has to wake up to the fact that its young people are under extreme stress, levels of anxiety I've never seen before, and that's well known around Australia."

He said assessing a student's progress and education should be done every day.

"A good teacher always diagnoses on the spot," he said.

Parents pull kids out of test

Parent Robert Hancock pulled his child out of the test, saying he did not think it was a useful metric.

"They seem to just prepare for NAPLAN in the state school system now, that's all they seem to do," he said.

Louise Barr sent her child to Kimberley College because of the opt-out policy.

"They give you the information as to the fact it's not compulsory, whereas I have another child at another school and that is not information that is given to you," she said.

"I don't think it's necessary to give them a formalised test to be able to test what level they're at.

"Not every child performs the same way in a formalised testing situation."

Queensland Teachers Union's Sam Pidgeon does not believe a snapshot is the best way to gauge overall performance. ( ABC News: Lexy Hamilton-Smith )

Queensland Education Minister Kate Jones did not provide data on the attendance rates for today's exams, but said it was important that students take part.

"NAPLAN is about us understanding at a state-wide and national level how we are progressing in those key areas," she said.

"It was never about how individual students were doing."

Queensland Teachers Union vice president Sam Pidgeon does not believe a snapshot of one day is the best way to gauge overall performance.

"As soon as you start taking one day of data in the year of a school's life and starting to compare schools [and] starting to create league tables, [you're] setting up an expectation that you can base a school on its NAPLAN results," she said.

"As soon as that happened obviously NAPLAN stopped having that original purpose."