Issue 119

We already know that COVID-19 made 2020 a year in which many of the standard approaches to education had to be shaken up. It’s now apparent 2021 will be just as significant on the schooling front.

The global pandemic has changed all of our lives and the ripple effect is immense. Even when we are all vaccinated and the infections and deaths have stopped, the impact on all aspects of life will be felt for years. What of the educational effect? What have we learnt? 

On the upside, COVID-19 has led to a greater appreciation of our teachers’ professionalism and dedication. But the disruption to NAPLAN created a gap in national comparative data at a time when our results from international assessments show how important that information is.

For parents, there was no nationally consistent point-in-time assessment in 2020 to help them understand how their children were progressing against national standards in literacy and numeracy. 

We know, through ACARA’s ongoing engagement with national peak parent representatives and through the many enquiries we have received from individual parents, that the lack of data around the impact of school closures and remote learning from home associated with the pandemic is a real concern. This makes the data for this year’s NAPLAN assessment particularly important.

NAPLAN returned in May this year, with more than 1.2 million students from more than 9,000 schools taking part in the tests.  Of those, about 70% did NAPLAN Online, submitting more than 2.9 million online tests from 870,000 students. 

NAPLAN, including the online format, is a truly collaborative effort, with multiple organisations across all states and territories working together. That it went smoothly this year is a testament to the efforts of education authorities, our schools and our teachers. 

The global pandemic has changed all of our lives and the ripple effect is immense. Even when we are all vaccinated and the infections and deaths have stopped, the impact on all aspects of life will be felt for years. What of the educational effect? What have we learnt?

The online tests are more engaging for many students and are ‘tailored’, which means the test adapts to student responses, presenting students with questions that may be more or less difficult depending on the correctness of their answers. This means better assessment and more precise results.

By the time you are reading this, ACARA will have published the summary results. The insights provided by the data will be one measure we can look to when considering the impact that COVID-19 has had on students’ attainment of the foundational literacy and numeracy skills that NAPLAN measures. 

Later this year, final results will be available in the National Report, giving a good picture of how school closures and remote learning and teaching have affected progress for different student sub-groups and geographic areas.

Governments and school systems can also use the results to identify those educational practices that are working to improve student outcomes. This aspect of the tests is often overlooked. 

To identify such practices, you have to look for schools that have consistently achieved a level of progress that is above what you would expect, given the socio-educational background of the students, rather than looking solely at overall achievement levels. 

Last year, ACARA analysed NAPLAN data at the school level and discovered that when you look at progress rather than just overall achievement, high-performing schools can be found right across the socio-educational spectrum. The things these schools tend to have in common are practices such as explicit teaching, good use of data about student learning and a collaborative approach to professional development.

Without NAPLAN, we would not have been able to identify these common practices of high-performing schools. NAPLAN data also helps education authorities identify schools where additional support and resourcing may be needed. 

This valuable information will continue to be enriched as we transition to all students completing NAPLAN tests online in 2022.

For more information on the 2021 NAPLAN Summary data, visit the NAP website.