Torrens Primary principal Sue Mueller doesn't have a single magic solution for improving children's literacy and numeracy abilities. But if she is pressed to reveal the formula behind her school's impressive improvements in NAPLAN scores over time, it's a combination of motivating teachers to make a difference, and making school a happy and inviting place for the children.
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Torrens is a largish school of more than 500 students with an early intervention unit. It's a middle-range school in terms of social advantage and it caters for both bright students and those who struggle.
Nominated this year by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority as one of a group of ACT schools showing impressive improvements in NAPLAN performance over time, Ms Mueller said it was gratifying to know the school was making a difference to young lives.
''It's so pleasing, we are all here with best interests of the children at heart and it is great to see the school's growth over the years, not just improvements for individual students.''
Ms Mueller said ''literacy and numeracy are absolutely at the core of what we do but we also need to make sure that our students want to come to school and enjoy the time they spend here''.
Noting that NAPLAN was ''just one'' of a number of useful diagnostic tools, Ms Mueller said her staff were constantly engaged in professional learning and mentoring and exposed to best practice, new research and trials on literacy and numeracy learning.
Canberra Grammar head Dr Justin Garrick said his school considered NAPLAN a useful tool to track each individual student and to ''stretch them onto the next level if they are doing well and to support them and address weaknesses if they aren't''.
The school was proactive about implementing early intervention for students who needed it. Dr Garrick said that while he had concerns around the application of NAPLAN more broadly, he would always see it as a valuable way to track individual performance over time.
Canberra Grammar has been in the top clutch of Canberra schools based on overall NAPLAN results, not just improvements over time, and Dr Garrick said it would be easy to become complacent if the school did not always focus on individual students.
''Even for those students who do really well, we concentrate on stretching them to the next level.''
Catholic school St John the Apostle in Florey was also nominated as a top improver with principal Matthew Egan-Richards saying meaningful professional learning had been having great results.
''We decided to really make literacy and numeracy our focus a few years ago and I am so proud of the staff for these results.''
St John the Apostle was not a typical middle-class Canberra school, according to Mr Egan-Richards, and he said it was vital that teachers were able to identify very early on any child who was struggling.
''We use NAPLAN, but we also use other testing and we do some pretty intensive early intervention from year 1 to make sure no child gets left behind.''
Professional peer support was important with teachers regularly videoing their classroom presentations to be analysed for strengths and weaknesses.
