We need NAPLAN to keep ACT schools transparent

There's always a lot of hype surrounding the tests: do they put unnecessary pressure on students?

Do they unfairly scrutinise the performance of teachers? Do they pit schools against each other?

This year there's the added frenzy surrounding the changes from a 10-band reporting system to four categories (exceeding, strong, developing and needs additional support), which the right-wingers decry as scrapping basic standards.

All of this discourse distracts from the fact that these national assessments are one of the only transparency measures in Australia's school education system and as such they collect valuable information for parents, teachers and state and territory education systems.

It's important to gather data on whether students are learning the basic skills to succeed in life.

The ACT's future of education strategy has lofty ambitions of students being able to creatively and collaboratively solve problems.

But how will they do this without having good reading skills?

How will they articulate their solutions without a grasp of how to write well-structured texts?

How will they be able to break down complicated mathematical problems without being confident in their basic numeracy skills?

The scientific method requires a hypothesis, repeating the experiment several times and then analysing results to draw conclusions.

If certain systems, schools or classes are performing well, it is important that we gather robust data over time in order to find out who they are and what they are doing right.

Conversely, we need to see where there are gaps and room for improvement.

School education systems need to adopt the learners' mindset that students are expected to have, rather than push back against collecting information which might show weaknesses or cause embarrassment.

The ACT always comes out above-average in the annual NAPLAN testing. The Education Directorate would like to think it's because of their amazingly well-resourced schools and skillful teachers.

However, a large part of the reason is that we have a highly-educated, wealthy population whose children will mostly hit achievement standards no matter what learning environment they are in.

There is still a sizeable portion of ACT students who are just meeting or fall below the minimum standards, according to data analysis from the Grattan Institute.

In year three, 9.2 per cent of students are at or below minimum standards in reading and 11.2 per cent are at this level in numeracy.

By year nine, 18.9 per cent of students are at or below minimum standards in reading and 16.7 per cent are at or below the minimum standards in Numeracy.

Year nine students with parents who finished year 12 end up three years and 11 months behind in reading compared to their peers whose parents finished a university degree.

In numeracy, the gap grows to two years and nine months.

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In short, there are still too many Canberra students who are behind in their skills.

If we don't test students and make this data public, how will we have confidence that the education system is working as it should?

The explosion in the number of students in home-schooling shows that some parents and carers are already voting with their feet.

Teachers may not like the public nature of NAPLAN reporting, but the education of young Australians is too important to be left to chance.

If we really care about equity and the power of education to be the great leveller in life, then we need to measure how our students are developing.

Other systems are subject to transparency measures, such as the national quality standards for early childhood education providers and the star rating system for residential aged care services.

The My School website is the school sector's snapshot of every Australian school in one place.

Not only does it have tables showing academic performance over time, it also collates data on where schools get their income, the number of enrolments and the socioeconomic status of the students.

It's clear that the criticisms of NAPLAN have been heard and acted on.

Bringing the testing and reporting timeframe forward will give teachers time to work on weaknesses in the later part of the school year.

The new achievement categories have been welcomed by parents.

Australian Parents Council chief executive Jenni Rickard said the switch from 10 bands to four levels of achievement would be useful in stimulating parent-teacher conversations.

"Often parents tell us they find it difficult to interpret the teacher jargon used in reporting, the simple presentation of this NAPLAN report will be beneficial to many parents across the country," she said.

Students will only fear NAPLAN if adults make it something to be anxious about.

If they just treat it like another day at school and the results are used positively to improve teaching and learning, that can only be a good thing.

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