The annual assessment for students in years 3, 5, 7, and 9 was only ever intended to provide valuable national data and improve accountability when it was initiated in 2008, yet research shows, it has increased teacher workload, intensified pressure and narrowed classroom priorities.
Outside of schools the emphasis on NAPLAN has resulted in a competitive culture that has seen some parents employ personal tutors in the hope of boosting their child’s results.
“NAPLAN itself isn’t a problem. Standardised testing isn’t the problem. It’s what’s grown up around it, the pressure and accountability,” University of Southern Queensland education lecturer Glenys Oberg shares.
For many teachers, the demands create ethical tensions, where they feel pushed to prioritise test preparation over holistic, relational and trauma-informed practice, the academic says.
This can contribute to what Oberg calls ‘moral injury’, a form of distress that occurs when professionals cannot act in line with their core values.
“I did a study for my PhD looking into the impacts of teachers who are working with a growing number of students who’ve experienced trauma, and one of the findings that came out was this idea of cognitive dissonance or moral injury, where teachers have strong opinions and knowledge,” Oberg explains.
“They’re professionals, they’re highly trained, highly skilled professionals who have strong ideas about what the students in their classrooms need to succeed, academically, emotionally, socially – they’re trained to meet kids where they are – yet NAPLAN tells them not to.
“Instead it forces all children into a particular box. When teachers are forced to do things like that, it not only is taking away their ability to give their students what they need, it is sometimes actively making teachers do things that are harming students – which results in these ideas of moral injury coming out in our teachers.”
Of great concern to Oberg, is the increased likelihood of this leading to burnout, disengagement and eventually, attrition.
“Teachers aren’t going to leave just because of NAPLAN, but it’s one more brick, it’s that one more thing on top of their already overloaded curriculum and hugely intense workload,” she says.
“There’s this one more thing that they are expected to fit in, and then they’re judged on the outcome of it and they know they are.
While standardised testing is intended to provide valuable national data and improve accountability, research shows it can also increase workload, intensify pressure and narrow classroom priorities.
If you’ve got four schools in a region, for example, and one school comes out a bit lower in numeracy, then you know that those teachers are going to have to answer why, Oberg says.
“It may simply be a completely different cohort or a different context - there’s so much that goes into teaching that teachers understand that NAPLAN doesn’t measure.”
Prior to academia, Oberg taught in primary schools for 20 odd years, and remembers when NAPLAN came in, it was described as a way for government to see where the gaps and the needs were, and to help with funding and staffing.
“We were promised it would never be used to create league tables and that it wouldn’t be used as part of an incentive for teachers, but while we don’t have traditional league tables, we all know that people look up NAPLAN results of schools when they’re deciding where their kids are going to go.
“And so NAPLAN has become this larger than life thing.”
The whole idea, the lecturer in curriculum and pedagogy, who specialises in educational psychology and wellbeing, says, was that it would be a moment in time in schools' calendar.
“But schools now do weeks of preparation,” Oberg laments.
“They have to administer these tests, which often includes teachers being asked to do supervision and more during their non-contact time, there’s a lot of pressure on teachers to defend the NAPLAN results of their class, and so you have teachers who are taking this pressure and then teaching to the test.”
This is entirely understandable, she says, particularly when your job is on the line or for those teachers who are in part-time or contract roles.
Oberg impresses that if the purpose of NAPLAN is to identify where the learning gaps and needs are, then there’s no real need for results to be shared with parents or even with schools.
“By the time students are doing NAPLAN this week, teachers already know who needs help in phonics or who needs help in numeracy, for example, and besides, by the time the NAPLAN results come back they’ll be woefully out of date anyway. They don’t contribute anything to what’s going on in schools.
“There’s an argument that standardised testing is helpful on a governmental level but as far as NAPLAN results individually being sent out to homes – all that does is place more pressure on the kids and the teachers.”
In public schools across Tasmania, as part of an escalation of industrial action against the State Government to improve pay and work conditions, the state branch of the AEU has withdrawn teacher involvement in rolling out NAPLAN tests, and from doing any sort of planning and preparation for covering classes.
The union’s David Genford claims the ban is intentionally minimising impact on student learning, but instead is designed to put pressure on the State Government, and Oberg concurs.
“Schools and teachers are still assessing their kids, schools and teachers in Tasmania are still going to be writing school reports, they’re still going to be having face-to-face meetings with families – so to be honest, on the ground, I don’t think anything’s going to be different.”
