The latest national education test results show the writing skills of year 7 and 9 students have gone backwards over the past decade, with experts saying more needs to be done to assist struggling high school students.



Preliminary results from this year’s Naplan tests, which cover reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, as well as numeracy, were released on Wednesday.

While the performance of primary school students was above the 2008 average in many areas, the improvements were not seen in secondary school.

Victoria’s education minister James Merlino has announced a special principal advisory committee to look at ways to improve the relevance of Naplan for year 9 students.

One idea on the table is a proficiency certificate based on student reading and numeracy results that would guide subject selection for year 11 and 12.

Students in year 9 around the country in both government and non-government schools experienced similar flat results and year 9 has long been considered the hardest cohort to engage in education, Merlino said.

“These results don’t reflect what students are capable of and we must investigate options to ensure our year 9 students are more engaged. This is about making the test more relevant, not adding unnecessary stress to Naplan,” Merlino said.

But educational experts were sceptical of that approach.

Grattan Institute school education program director Peter Goss said the focus should be on building better foundations in earlier years.

“It’s like trying to change direction on a super tanker, it takes a very long time and … happens very slowly,” Goss said. “Once you fall behind it is hard to catch up.”

He said more support was needed to help kids with the transition from primary school to high school.

“In year 7 a third of the kids might still be in that learning-to-read stage and yet they are expected to start covering more and more content. Secondary school teachers are not specialists in teaching kids how to read,” Goss said.

University of Sydney education expert Rachel Wilson agreed more effort needed to go into helping struggling students catch up before they got to high school.

“If those students haven’t been well supported through their primary school education and haven’t been given the fundamentals … they feel like shrugging their shoulders, holding up their hands and saying ‘I’ve had it, that’s it for me,’” she said.

Acara chief executive David de Carvalho said schoolchildren had generally improved their writing skills from the 2018 results.

“Students are to be congratulated for this year’s improvement, especially year three students, where the results are particularly encouraging,” he said.

But students in years 7 and 9 performed below the 2011 baseline for writing. Compared with the 2008 average, students performed better for year 5 numeracy, years 3 and 5 reading, years 3 and 5 spelling, and year 3 grammar.

The federal education minister, Dan Tehan, said state and territory governments should give greater autonomy to principals, and urged parents to play a greater role through bodies such as school councils.

“We’ve got to make sure that we’re decluttering the curriculum so teachers can teach in the classroom,” Tehan told the ABC.

The standardised national tests have long been a source of controversy in the education sector, with former New South Wales education minister, Rob Stokes, among its prominent critics.

Stokes said last year the program encouraged teachers to “teach to the test”, had fuelled “edu-businesses” and was limited in its usefulness.

This year was the second time some of the tests were taken online, an option taken up by about half of the nation’s schools. But the system was plagued by technical issues, with some students losing connectivity and others unable to log in at all.

Affected students were able to resit the tests but the issue resulted in a disclaimer on the preliminary results warning they should be “interpreted with care”.

Acara believed the pen and paper test results were comparable with the online versions.

However, Australian Education Union acting president Meredith Peace said teachers and principals shouldn’t trust the results as they were “so seriously compromised”.

“There is no transparency about how Acara have arrived at the results data published today, and the community must seriously question just how rigorous the independent assessment of the Naplan results were,” she said.

Deakin University education experts also warned the test results could not be fully relied upon, arguing the technical glitches had weakened Naplan’s aim of providing comparable results.

The federal Labor education spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek said the government had failed to reverse declines in reading, writing and maths.

“Kids need to know the basics. It’s the foundation of the rest of their education. We can’t afford for the next generation to be held back,” she said.

A complete transition to online testing has been pushed back to 2021 because of this year’s issues. A report on the underlying causes of the technical disruptions is due to soon be handed to the nation’s education ministers.