The My School website has been controversial since its release in 2010.
Julia Gillard’s Federal Labor Government, at the time, intended it to assist parents and communities in understanding a school’s performance over time.
And today, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) is updating its data set for 2023.
The My School website includes information on enrolment, attendance, student background, NAPLAN results, finances, and post-school destinations.
Dr Don Carter is the Head of the School of International Studies and Education at the University of Technology Sydney. He says My School tells an incomplete and potentially misleading narrative about listed schools.
Dr Carter says it only provides a partial portrait of schools through the limited datasets of the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA), which include gender, indigeneity, language backgrounds, post-school destinations, and recurrent income.
“The singular focus on NAPLAN results as encapsulating student performance distorts perceptions about a school’s capacity to address the needs and interests of students,” he told EducationDaily.
“For example, schools generally run programs in sports, public speaking, and drama which add value to the learning experiences of students. However, because such programs are not captured in a school’s profile on the website, the ‘worth’ of a school is potentially diminished by only capturing NAPLAN test results.”
NAPLAN results should be used responsibly
Dr Carter explains that NAPLAN results can be used responsibly if handled right.
“Responsible data use involves analysis and forward planning,” he told EducationDaily.
“Schools and teachers use data from the NAPLAN tests to inform their teaching and learning programs to address the learning needs of their students, which stands to improve student learning and attitudes to learning. Irresponsible data use can involve using NAPLAN results to rank schools, evaluate teacher performance, and draw conclusions about the quality of a school.”
Adverse effects, he says, can include “the media portraying NAPLAN results as a measure of the above points, which influences public opinion on how well (or not) students are performing”.
This problem is exacerbated when high-performing schools are singled out by the media, arguably creating a culture around meeting NAPLAN results.
Is it time to reimagine NAPLAN?
Griffith University’s Professor Beryl Exley says NAPLAN needs to be recognised for what it is, and the culture surrounding NAPLAN needs to be reimagined.
“[It’s] a narrow set of assessments for general literacy and numeracy knowledge and skills conducted four times across seven years of a child’s schooling life,” she told EducationDaily. “The knowledge and skills assessed do not cover all that matters in a child’s schooling, such as the deep knowledge and complex skills of the full range of learning areas, or other factors such as emotional and social intelligence.”
Because NAPLAN is based on the year level, not the child’s age, Professor Exley says the impact of this is more pronounced in the primary years, “where students in year three, for example, range from just over seven-and-a-half years to just over eight-and-a-half years”.
“This extra year of life experiences is not factored into NAPLAN scores.”
Media spreads NAPLAN misinformation
Professor Bexley lambasted the media for their portrayal of NAPLAN results.
“We’ve seen the adverse effects of a high-stakes publicly reported NAPLAN assessment already,” she says.
“Students’ NAPLAN results have been used inappropriately as a proxy for teacher effectiveness. Quality teaching is much more comprehensive than students’ NAPLAN results, and it’s impossible to pinpoint individual teachers’ effects. Some private schools require students to disclose their NAPLAN results as part of the enrolment process – again, raising the stakes for students taking NAPLAN.”
Professor Bexley says the flow-on impact of pressure from parents or school leaders sees teaching time for English and Mathematics in some schools being used for “skilling and drilling for NAPLAN, instead of keeping up with curriculum requirements”.
She uses the misunderstanding the media has of recent spelling results to show how the data doesn’t tell the whole picture.
“NAPLAN data has revealed the plateauing of spelling skills in the secondary school years,” she told EducationDaily.
“Secondary students have more access to digital spelling functions and are therefore less reliant on instant recall spelling memory. That doesn’t mean that secondary school students haven’t developed high levels of word knowledge. It means that spelling happens in a different way for students once they are word-processing their written assignments.”
“The NAPLAN spelling test is thus a misrepresentation of how secondary school students manage accurate spelling.”
Comparing performance requires a multi-faceted approach
Professor Exley argues that the best course of action is to use the data to provide statistics and visuals that compare performance alongside other factors, such as socio-economic status, geographical location or students representing diverse populations.
“The OCED leads the way in this regard,” she told EducationDaily.
“This level of transparency shows that Australia has a high-quality education system with a long tail of inequity. The long tail of inequity is directly linked to family socio-economic status. Another ethical response would be to do away with testing every student and move to testing a sample of the population who fall into the interest categories. In this way, we’d get a picture of the health of the education system and a good sense of how the previous set of interventions impacted student learning gain. Sample testing would still provide information about where to distribute resources without the negative impact of high-stakes standardised testing for all students.”
Dr Carter echoes her sentiment.
“A more ethical future acknowledges that education is both an individual and collective enterprise,” he says. “Thus, including more comprehensive and accurate profiling of schools on the website will provide a stronger sense of what a school ‘offers’ – to tell a more complete story.”
Reflect a range of student interests
Dr Carter says My School should explain what programs are conducted across a school to address the range of student interests and needs, with profiles that should aim to report on “how a school serves the needs of its local community, rather than the results of a national and generic test”.
“A shift away from rhetoric is also required,” he told EducationDaily.
For example, discourses of ‘choice’ have little currency for many rural families due to distances between towns and schools and the subsequent paucity of choice.
“This will necessarily involve a ‘recalibration’ by the media in the way it understands and reports NAPLAN results.”
