At a conference recently, I described NAPLAN and particularly the My School website as the King Kong of education policy. Just like King Kong, NAPLAN and the publishing of school-by-school results on the My School website started out as relatively harmless, but has turned into a wrecking ball for Australian education.

Research released this week by Macquarie University and reported in the Herald on school location being linked to NAPLAN results is a great example of exactly how misleading NAPLAN reporting has become and how easy it is to wrongly interpret school-by-school results on the My School website.

My School and NAPLAN ... are they really serving our children?

The Herald headline, ‘Where you live is determining your school’s NAPLAN score’, is wrong. The research correctly identifies that above-average and below-average “school” results are increasingly concentrated in different parts of every city and in the regions. The accompanying media release, however, incorrectly concludes that, “Education quality should not be limited by a school’s location.”

That is the wrong interpretation of the My School website because it implies that education quality is limited to a school’s location. It isn’t. Some of the best performing schools in the country with the highest improvement rates for students are in some of the most disadvantaged suburbs and towns.

It is also wrong to imply that NAPLAN is an accurate measure of ‘‘education quality’’.