"I've been really troubled ... about the increased presence of commercial providers in schools," says primary school principal Corinne Campbell. Credit:Daniel Munoz The growing emphasis on NAPLAN tests is giving companies considerable influence over what is valued in education, teachers say. "A lot of education policy is shaped around NAPLAN and trying to improve things there and that does, unfortunately, shape the way people teach," said Corinne Campbell, who was a primary school teacher for 20 years before becoming principal at a North Sydney primary school last year. "If there's a deficit in an area [of the tests], teachers do use the curriculum material created by companies like Pearson," said Ms Campbell, who is also secretary of the Middle Harbour Teachers Association. "I've been really troubled in the last five to 10 years about the increased presence of commercial providers in schools."

In NSW, Pearson has been responsible for printing and distributing NAPLAN tests, overseeing the marking process and reporting on results since 2012 under two agreements with the NSW Education Standards Authority worth a total of $51.9 million. Pearson has also been contracted to develop the OECD's benchmark Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test for 2018, and is one of the biggest textbook publishers and providers of professional development services for teachers in Australia and worldwide. "The fact that one company can have a monopoly over the global system where it can run national and international tests, as well as mark the tests and report on them, and market materials on how to do well is certainly cause for concern," one of the report's authors and a lecturer at the University of Queensland, Dr Anna Hogan, said. She said the increased focus on tests such as NAPLAN and PISA had done little to benefit students but had been profitable for private companies. "Global education reform is already well down this path, the idea that standardised testing is a way to improve and push up students, and what we've seen is that that isn't really happening," Dr Hogan said.

Pearson Australia managing director David Barnett said parts of the business were kept completely separate and the company produces only "a tiny amount" of NAPLAN-related resources. "The conflicts of interests being suggested would be in breach of our contractual obligations to our clients," Mr Barnett said. However, the report finds there is a sense among teachers that "buying Pearson textbooks … [will] help the students do well on Pearson-designed tests". Private businesses are also heavily involved in a national push to standardise and share school and student data and "Australian schooling now has arguably the most developed national data infrastructure in the world", the report finds. Federal, state and territory education ministers in 2010 began implementing the little-known National Schools Interoperability Program (NSIP), which is supported by 16 businesses, 13 government bodies and nine Catholic and independent school bodies.

The program includes the creation of a data hub that will hold a student's identity, enrolment, legal, medical and assessment records and can be shared with external providers. In NSW, student enrolment and attendance data and a school's operational data are expected to be transitioned to the hub by the end of the year, and assessment, legal, medical and behavioural data will be centralised by the end of next year. Detailed NAPLAN data for each student will be made available in late 2019. The report's authors said they were unaware of "any similar initiatives that are as sufficiently advanced or involve the same degree of co-ordination between federal and state government and industry partners". A spokeswoman for NSIP said: "[It's] a standardised process by which schools and school authorities as purchasers of services, and private companies as suppliers of services, can exchange data accurately and securely. "Companies would only have access to the data referred to in the question if authorised by schools and school authorities to do so."