Australia’s ‘business as usual’ NAPLAN results are finally poised to shift: expert

Associate Professor Steven Lewis, principal research fellow and academic lead at ACU’s Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, says that with adequate school funding now in place, it remains to be seen if the money will translate into better student outcomes – and especially for those seemingly trapped in the ‘long tail’ of underachievement. 

EducationHQ’s Sarah Duggan spoke to Lewis about the ‘critical juncture’ he believes we’ve reached and what the new NAPLAN results mean moving forward. 

SD: Hi Steven, what is your take on the latest NAPLAN results? Is this a good news story – should we be celebrating these very minor improvement shifts evident in the data?

SL: It’s always the story behind the data, isn’t it? I think you’re very right to point out, that by and large, ignoring a little bit of movement at the margins, we’re seeing a pretty consistent trend now for quite a few years where most students, in most respects, are doing pretty well at NAPLAN.

And that’s testament to the hard work of our schools, our teachers. I think, in some ways, that’s a very, very heartening story. The broader point I would make is that for so long as well, though, we’ve had this very long tale of underachievement in Australian schools, as indicated by NAPLAN as well.

And invariably, we’ve kept testing year on year, but we’re not seeing that situation change. In some respects, that’s disappointing. But also, I think, in some respects, it’s a bit of an obvious conclusion, because if we’ve maintained ‘business as usual’ in terms of how we value and resource and support schools and teachers doing the work they do, it’s probably not particularly surprising that we’re seeing ‘business as usual’ results.

That’s potentially a bit of a cautionary tale, but the flipside of that is, with the Better and Fair Schools Agreement that was announced by Minister Clare last year, in which all states and territories have now signed on to, I think we do have this sort watershed moment – we’ve finally got 100 per cent of the SRS funding allocated to students, regardless of which state you’re in, where you are in that state, what school and system you go to.

So, we’ve really got this sort of once-in-a-generation moment where we’ve got all the economic factors pointing in the same direction, saying ‘all these schools now and all these students are going to be supported as they’re intended to be’.

It’ll be interesting to see, I think, what happens in subsequent years now that we have this funding, and to see how that funding’s spent, what the impact of that funding is, and how that then translates into student learning – particularly for those least advantaged students, who for so long now, we’ve really failed them, I think it’s fair to say.

 [That fact that we are getting] consistent results for high-performing students, students who are succeeding and achieving well at NAPLAN, I think is absolutely a testament to the hard work of many people.

But we haven’t really made a dent in a very persistent tale of underperformance, and these are the students who deserve the most help and assistance, so that they can feel fulfilled and go on to live happy and healthy lives, and have schooling as something they feel excited about and happy about, not a source of continual disappointment and underachievement.

I think we owe it to them to provide that support, and hopefully that’s what the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement will now enable us to do.

Associate Professor Steven Lewis says our consistent NAPLAN results year on year demonstrates that “for much of the country, there’s been a real reluctance to make significant new investments or inroads into education, we’ve been content with business as usual”.

Some experts have said that if we want better learning outcomes we actually need to focus on ‘better teaching’ rather than pumping in more school funding to the states. What is your view on this argument?

I think that’s not an unfair question, the broad premise of it, because more funding in and of itself isn’t necessarily the answer, right?

If you think back to 2008, and Kevin Rudd building the ‘education revolution’, a lot of money was spent on schools, but it was spent on building school halls … but whether that translates into better student learning is, debatable.

So I think the devil is in the detail with how that money is spent, and one of the big things that I see focused on with the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement is that … it’s also going to be providing funding for additional allied health services in schools, so that’ll be people like occupational therapists, psychologists, youth workers, speech pathologists – those expert adults who can be in the room with teachers to provide support.

Because for a lot of our students, particularly those who are perennially underperforming, it’s not a case necessarily that they just need to work harder or try harder.

It’s reflecting some very difficult conditions that they’re growing up in, and they’re sort of behind the eight ball, if you like, when they come to school relative to their more advantaged peers…

What we’ve never had in the past is that quantum of funding to properly resource schools and students’ learning. Now we do, the question will be, do we spend it well, and do we get good value for that money?

And I think that is something which subsequent NAPLAN test results will ultimately bear out amongst other data – but we can take off the table [the issue that] we don’t have enough funding, because that funding argument has been a bit of a political football for decades now…

There’s obviously been much debate around NAPLAN and its use as a standardised assessment, as well as discussions about its impact on schools. Looking at these latest results, do you think NAPLAN tells us something important about the overall state of schooling across the country?

Really good question. There’s limitations to standardised testing, because it sees schooling, performance, and student learning in a particular way. That’s the very nature of it. But what it can enable, and what NAPLAN results have shown us over the years, is it can be used to provide a consistent way of taking the temperature of how different school systems perform, how different states and territories perform, and how different student populations perform.

I think that is ultimately its key value. It can be used in a way to take the temperature. Now, the difficulty is when the initial purpose of NAPLAN as a means of taking the temperature, and not being used in a high-stakes way, not being used to measure individual student performance, gets corrupted.

We’ve now ended up with a situation where individual student results and performance are identifiable down to the student level. And that’s not what NAPLAN was initially intended to do.

So as with any big policy, as with any big political device like NAPLAN testing, things change, and the original intent can sometimes get muddied in the implementation.

But I think the basic premise of NAPLAN as a way of taking a high-level snapshot of how our young people are performing, it’s a way of identifying where we can best target our resources to assist those students who need it most.

[Yet], you can’t test your way to schooling success. You can’t test your way to a better schooling system, you need to use the information that’s provided by tests like NAPLAN to then do something with it.

I think the consistent performance of students on NAPLAN over the years demonstrates that for much of the country, there’s been a real reluctance to make significant new investments or inroads into education, we’ve been content with business as usual.

And of course, business as usual serves very well the students who are performing well and exceeding expectations on NAPLAN, but business as usual is completely inadequate and insufficient for students who need that additional support, and schools who need that additional support.

We might be able to revisit NAPLAN in subsequent years as well and talk about how can we do it better ... we can clearly modify NAPLAN to make it better fit for purpose.

A suggestion I would be strongly encouraging ACARA to consider would be, can we get similarly good quality data and information about our students and our schooling systems [via] a sampling method of selecting students, rather than doing census testing where every student sits the test? Is that still equally robust and useful data? But is it less expensive to administer? Is it less intrusive into the school activities? Is it less stressful for students and teachers? Is it less disruptive to the normal day-to-day learning that teachers are trying to do in their classroom?

I think that should be an ongoing live debate. But as a basic tool, NAPLAN is doing what NAPLAN can do, but … there’s not a single school in the world that’s ever tested its way to high performance and high student learning outcomes.

You then need to use that test data to do something meaningful.