NAPLAN can reveal broad patterns in literacy and numeracy, but it cannot diagnose individual student needs and too often turns disadvantage into school reputation.
In March this year, roughly 1.3 million Australian students across some 9,300 school campuses sat 4.5 million individual NAPLAN tests. Individual reports are now landing in homes, and national results are due in August. The media will soon report which states improved, which groups fell behind, and whether this year’s scores are “encouraging” or “alarming.” Politicians will promise targeted action. Schools will be compared. Then the cycle will begin again.
The more important question will remain largely unasked: after nearly two decades of NAPLAN, what has this vast testing system actually done for the student sitting in front of a teacher tomorrow morning?
I spent over 40 years in public education, the last two decades of it as a principal, and I sat with NAPLAN data every year of its existence until my retirement. My concern is not with assessment itself, it is with what NAPLAN has become: a limited instrument for monitoring literacy and numeracy that has grown into an administrative, commercial and political system increasingly shaping the education it was supposedly designed only to measure.
NAPLAN can reveal broad national and jurisdictional patterns, identify persistent inequalities between groups, and alert governments to areas needing investigation. What it cannot do is explain why an individual student struggled, distinguish between the many possible causes, or prescribe the teaching response that student needs.
A teacher’s own assessment is continuous, contextual and responsive to the child in front of them. NAPLAN is an episodic sample taken under artificial conditions, showing performance at a single moment with no window onto what produced it. NAPLAN can identify where a problem may exist. It cannot diagnose its cause. Australia has spent nearly two decades treating a thermometer as a diagnosis.
The cost I find hardest to accept – because I have watched it happen to schools I know well – is that the annual publication of school-level results converts socioeconomic inequality into reputation. Researchers have shown repeatedly that most of the variation in NAPLAN scores between schools is explained by factors entirely outside a school’s control. Forty-one education bodies said as much in an open letter last year, warning that crude rankings harm students, teachers and communities. Families with the means to choose a school act on the ranking they see, drawing away from schools serving disadvantaged communities exactly the enrolment mix and resourcing that keeps those schools viable. The result is further residualisation, low-SES public schools left serving an ever more concentrated population of disadvantage, judged by a test that was always going to reflect that concentration back at them.
The political response too often intensifies this pressure. When the 2025 results were released, federal Education Minister Jason Clare called Better and Fairer Schools Agreement funding “not a blank cheque,” tied to reforms meant to reduce the number of students needing additional support. That mechanism sits between the Commonwealth and the states, not between a minister and a principal. But the logic travels downwards. A result becomes a target; the target becomes a direction; and responsibility settles on the school, even when much of what produced the result lies beyond its control.
I know how that pressure feels. Early in my time as a principal, I was directed by the then NSW Education Minister to improve my school’s results. I knew that the quickest way to lift the published average was not necessarily to teach to the test, but to keep the lowest-performing four or five students away from the test. I never did that, but I knew of schools that did. The incentive is not merely anecdotal. A study of nearly 7,000 Australian schools found that withdrawn students were disproportionately the weakest performers, with independent schools withdrawing them at roughly twice the rate of government schools. When publication rewards exclusion, the resulting score measures not just student achievement but how a school responded to the pressure to protect its reputation.
There was another perversity in my own school. When our results improved, the allocation of specialist support was reduced, because the data suggested the need had diminished. That seemed rational on paper; in practice it removed the very support that had produced the improvement. The school was effectively punished for its own success. Sustainable gains among vulnerable students require sustained support, not support withdrawn the moment an indicator moves.
Then there is the market the test was never meant to create. NAPLAN is explicitly presented as requiring no special preparation. Yet a thriving national tutoring industry, from large franchises to individual coaches, now advertises NAPLAN-specific preparation and “guaranteed improvement” programs. Part of the answer is structural, affluent families can simply purchase familiarity with the test’s format. But part of it is cultural: understandable parental aspiration is drawn into believing every measurable result shapes the next opportunity, and NAPLAN becomes an early marker in a pipeline running through selective schools, the HSC and the ATAR. The testing system did not create that aspiration, but it has helped convert it into anxiety, precisely what a coaching industry is built to monetise.
None of this needs to be speculative, because another country has already run the experiment. New Zealand did not abolish an exact equivalent of NAPLAN. It ended its compulsory National Standards regime in 2017; schools kept assessing and reporting to parents, but compulsory reporting against national benchmarks stopped. A University of Waikato analysis found only 16 per cent of surveyed teachers and principals believed the standards had produced a positive impact. Tellingly, New Zealand’s government is now moving back towards a common assessment tool, not because National Standards succeeded, but because a system promising simple answers to complex problems retains an enduring political attraction.
None of this is an argument for abolishing NAPLAN outright. It is an argument for distinguishing national monitoring from universal high-stakes testing, disclosing NAPLAN’s true public cost, and ending crude public rankings. New Zealand’s experience shows that abandoning a compulsory, universal testing regime does not mean abandoning assessment, it means putting assessment back in its proper place.
John Frew worked in public education, including as foundation principal at a secondary school for students with Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Disturbance. John has authored numerous books the latest being ‘Neuroscience and Teaching Very Difficult Kids’. Since retiring, he has continued to comment on social issues.