Senator Birmingham said that while there were improvements over the long term in reading, writing and numeracy at some year levels, "we need to be aiming for more consistent improvements".

"That means looking at what can be learned from our high-achieving schools and what they do that can apply in other schools," he said.

This is the 10th year of NAPLAN testing and the results have been a long source of frustration to educators and policy makers looking for improvements in Australian school achievement, which has fallen for the past decade against most international benchmarks.

Good news

The good news in the 2017 results, based on standardised tests given to over 1 million children in May, is that there are long-term improvements in year 3 reading, spelling, and grammar and punctuation and year 5 reading, spelling and numeracy.

But no other learning skills show long-term, statistically-significant improvement, and student performance in year 7 writing has gone backwards.

The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), the government body which runs NAPLAN tests, said that in spite of the patchy improvements in the results, there was a "positive trend".


"Importantly, we see a gradual redistribution of students from lower bands of achievement to higher ones, particularly in some domains and year levels, such as Year 3 reading," said ACARA chief executive Rob Randall.

He acknowledged that it would be better to see "sustained growth in results across every domain and year level at the national level and in each state and territory".

"However, lasting improvements in student achievement take a number of years to flow through school systems and require consolidating gains over time," he said.

Overall, NAPLAN scores are highest in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT, and lowest in the Northern Territory.

Best record

But Western Australia and Queensland have the best record of long-term improvement, although it is only in limited areas. Queensland has made the largest strides, with major gains in year 3 (reading, spelling, and grammar and punctuation) and year 5 (numeracy).

From next year NAPLAN testing will start moving online in the biggest change made to the test since it started in 2008. It will mean that results are available much faster and be more useful as feedback to teachers and parents.

It will also lead to testing being more precise because, after the first few questions determine a student's general level, later questions in a test will be focused on locating each student's skill level more exactly.