Launched by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), the PAT Early Literacy program has been developed for students in Foundation and Year 1 and its creators say it is designed to work within the ‘practical realities’ of the classroom.

Sandra Knowles, ACER’s Senior Assistant Director of Assessment Development, says the assessment suite has been three years in the making. 

“What we wanted to achieve with PAT Early Literacy was a tool that allows teachers to monitor students’ performance in those key areas that we know from the research are foundational to later reading development,” she tells EducationHQ. 

Phonics, listening comprehension and reading comprehension are all targeted so teachers can get a complete picture of a student’s literacy proficiency, Knowles adds. 

“For example, a student might be quite strong in their development, say, of their decoding skills or their word recognition skills, but not in their listening comprehension, particularly if they haven’t been brought up in a book-rich environment.

“So then once the student learns to read, they might struggle to actually interpret what they’re reading. So you kind of need the whole gamut of information to really identify where students might need the most support and to give them the best chance of success.

“Teachers are receiving very detailed diagnostic information about exactly where students might need support or where the obstacles might be in their progress,” Knowles explains. 

Narrated by digital characters, with instructions, encouragement and practice embedded throughout the assessment, the expert says the tool has been built with teachers’ escalating workload firmly in mind. 

“Our aim in developing this assessment suite was always to consider the load that it puts on the teachers. It’s one thing we hear about schools all the time, that the teachers have so little time.

“They’re managing so many competing demands, and one-to-one assessments are really, really valuable, but they’re also extremely time consuming. So, for these assessments, we’ve designed it so that they’ve got a digital character that’s introduced at the very beginning of the assessment and it guides them through to the end,” Knowles says. 

“This character gives them a quest to begin with. So for phonics and related skills, for example, the students are told that by answering the questions they’re helping a group of adorable little aliens travel back to their home planet.

“So then they go through the assessment, they see the aliens make progress, and then by the end of the assessment they have the satisfaction of seeing the aliens reach their home planet – and so it’s meant to be quite an engaging, enjoyable experience.

“And it also takes them to the practice questions, so they’re shown exactly what they need to do, when they need to do it, how to move on to the next question and so on.”

Knowles says one of the biggest challenges in early years assessment is balancing obtaining meaningful evidence with what is practical in the classroom. 

The listening comprehension and reading comprehension assessments are adaptive, meaning rather than every student completing the same set of questions, a student’s responses to the first set of questions determine which set they receive next.

This helps ensure students are assessed at an appropriate level of challenge without increasing the overall testing time, Knowles suggests. 

The launch comes as schools face growing pressure to identify learning needs earlier and to provide targeted support.

The latest NAPLAN results show one-third of Australian students are not meeting “challenging but reasonable” expectations in literacy, in what some experts have deemed to be indicative of “stagnant” underperformance.

More than 40 per cent of students did not reach benchmarks in grammar in the 2026 results. 

Nationally, the percentage of Year 3 students in the exceeding proficiency level is 13.3 per cent on average, ranging from 8 per cent in writing to 19.4 per cent in reading.

Meanwhile, some 11.3 per cent are in need of additional support, ranging from 6.7 per cent in writing to 16.3 per cent in grammar and punctuation.

National reading and writing scores were lower across all year levels in 2026 compared to last year. 

Research shows that literacy challenges identified in the early years are easier to address than difficulties that persist into the later years of schooling. 

“Reading is more than phonics alone,” Knowles adds.

“By assessing phonics and related skills, listening comprehension and reading comprehension separately, teachers can better understand what is driving a student’s literacy development and make more informed decisions about next steps.”

As part of the PAT suite, PAT Early Literacy also allows schools to monitor student’s literacy development over time.

The Reading Comprehension assessment is reported on the existing PAT Reading achievement scale, which helps schools to build a continuous picture of student growth from the earliest years onwards.