The 2026 NAPLAN testing window opened this week with a widespread server outage that left over a million students unable to complete the writing test. Yikes! Meanwhile, in Tasmania, we saw the total and indefinite ban on NAPLAN testing in public schools by the Australian Education Union (AEU) as part of ongoing pay and workload disputes. While these disruptions made national headlines, every year there are parents who withdraw their children from NAPLAN due to test anxiety, not seeing enough benefit, or simply being opposed to standardised testing as a process.
As a researcher who’s spent years investigating the features of student writing, and as a parent who’s sat at the kitchen table helping my son, Henry, prepare for these tests, I’ve found myself reflecting on what is at stake for children who miss out on this high-stakes test. Is NAPLAN really just about a score or a snapshot of learning on a single day? Could it impact students’ writing development in a more profound way that education stakeholders should be aware of?
NAPLAN as a house inspection
For the past 15 years, many valid critiques have been levelled at NAPLAN testing, and perhaps the most common of these is that NAPLAN is nothing more than an artificial and inauthentic hurdle that wastes a lot of time, energy, and school resources. But another way to think about it is through the lens of a house inspection.
Nobody renting likes to have their house inspected, but we can all agree they serve important purposes. If you never have an inspection, you might never properly clean under the fridge or declutter the spare room. The event of the inspection creates a necessity for cleaning. You have to open up your home for external scrutiny, and the real risk involved here makes you prioritise cleaning. If the owner or their proxy doesn’t like what they see, you might find yourself looking for another rental. While we don’t like the stress this brings, it clearly drives our behaviour, which then brings several unintended benefits (such as being able to live in a clean house and know where things are – for a while at least).
In my view, NAPLAN serves a very similar function for student writing (not to mention other aspects of literacy and numeracy). It provides a definite moment in time where a student must clean up their learning about many aspects of writing scattered through their minds and English books (e.g., sentence structure, punctuation, forming arguments, etc.), bring all this together into a cohesive whole for external assessment.
For my son, Henry, the looming test in Year 3 was a catalyst for the two of us to engage in focused, intentional work that brought together what he’d learnt at school about writing strong narratives and persuasive texts. Did he want to do this? Not particularly. Well, no more than a person about to have a house inspection. But was it worthwhile for his writing development? I would say yes, and in this post, I’ll explain how.
From PhD to kitchen table
My interest in NAPLAN writing extends beyond parenting into my work at UQ. For my PhD, I explored the structural and linguistic choices made by the highest-scoring students for the 2011 NAPLAN persuasive writing task. I’ve since spent a career looking at how high- and low-scoring students use language in different ways to persuade and entertain their markers.
I put this research into practice when supporting Henry through his Year 3 and Year 5 tests. We used a novel approach I came up with, one I’m currently developing into a resource for other parents, that helped to spell out the demands of the NAPLAN writing test. Henry is mathematically minded by nature, but by learning about particular persuasive and narrative writing features in preparation for the NAPLAN test, it turns out he developed a writing toolkit that he’s since used in many other contexts.
As one example of this, Henry recently applied for a scholarship to attend a private high school. He first had to handwrite a letter of introduction to the principal. Quickly, he recognised (without my prompting!) that this letter was really just another form of persuasive text. He knew how to structure the text, how to form logical arguments incorporating evidence and examples, and how to marshal particular rhetorical devices to deliver persuasive punch. It turns out, Henry internalised these skills during our NAPLAN practice. As part of the same scholarship application, Henry sat a timed exam to test his academic skills. One of the main questions required him to write a short story. He used what we’d covered about narrative writing to compose a story about World War II that he later described as “the best story I’ve ever written.” Pretty cool to hear him say that after an intense day of scrutiny!
This experience has brought to light a clear sequence of events. Henry was taught many things about writing over several years as a primary school student, but it was all essentially scattered through his mind. The house inspection nature of NAPLAN forced him (and me) to engage in focused preparation for narrative and persuasive writing under pressure. He had to collect and sort out the scattered learning to be able to produce a cohesive text that demonstrated what he could do. This collection and sorting (i.e., synthesis) allowed his learning about writing to take root in his mind and enabled a successful transfer of knowledge to other educational contexts, even stressful ones like the scholarship application.
The foundations under the story
Now in Grade 6, Henry doesn’t need to worry about NAPLAN this year. Earlier this week, he came home and proudly shared the draft of a narrative he’s working on about a selfless war veteran. It’s the most sophisticated piece of writing I’ve seen him produce, with mature themes of grief after loss and self-sacrifice for a community. I think it’s a great text (it even had me a bit teary at the end). Henry’s teacher agrees, encouraging him to submit it to an independent writing competition.
But when I put on my researcher’s hat and look at his structural and linguistic choices closely, I can still see the foundations of valued narrative choices we formed at the kitchen table beneath the intricacies of the more mature storytelling. What we practised together in Year 3 and 5 doesn’t seem to have limited his creativity; it’s given him a firm base for storywriting, and upon this he’s now able to experiment and play with language to affect his readers. He’s even talking about becoming a novelist in the future!
Why missing the test matters for student learning (in my view)
Should we thank NAPLAN then for Henry’s new love of writing and his development? Well, not exactly. Of course, it was Henry’s own dedication and skills, the teachers who taught him to write, and the focused work we did together to synthesise this learning that seems to have made the difference. That said, the Year 3 and 5 NAPLAN tests gave us the kick in the pants we needed to make that work happen (just like a house inspection). If Henry missed out on NAPLAN, all the learning he’d done about aspects of writing could have stayed scattered and unsorted through his mind, like odd socks and used milk cartons strewn around a messy rental.
NAPLAN carries a lot of baggage, from causing anxiety for students and teachers alike, narrowing the school curriculum, and enabling the creation of school ranking tables that can even impact house prices in different suburbs. I’ve also previously written about some simple changes we could make to improve the design of the writing test. When students miss NAPLAN, however, they miss out on a unique opportunity to synthesise and apply their learning, especially when it comes to the tricky task of writing. While certainly difficult and stressful for many, NAPLAN can also contribute meaningfully to students’ ongoing writing development by giving them a set time and place to show what they can do.
Thanks for this thoughtful post Damon. I think we all know that the people who object to NAPLAN (the metaphorical house-inspection) are not the students, but the teachers*, as it is their responsibility not only to tidy up before inspection day, but to keep the house tidy all year round. In fact, one could argue that the best preparation for a house inspection is simply regular and consistent cleaning and tidying routines – not a mad flurry of stressful, inefficient, and poorly sustained busy work in the lead-up to an external inspection.
While it’s great that you, as an education academic, can invest your time and intellectual capital into supporting your child’s success, most students do not have parents who are reading and writing academics, so our everyday classroom practices, right across the country and across school systems, need to be the rising tide that lifts all boats. In discussions about “test anxiety” I would hate this to become a discourse of student responsibility. The onus here is fairly and squarely on the adults to teach well.
*Not all teachers object to NAPLAN. Some are comfortable with it as a valuable form of accountability and use the data as part of their overall school quality assurance mechanisms. Teachers do not need to “completely love” NAPLAN to think this way. These things usually sit on a continuum rather than being a dichotomy.
Hello Pam,
Thanks very much for taking the time to engage with this post and share your thoughts about NAPLAN and teaching.
I focused mainly on the student perspective in the post because of the NAPLAN ban in Tasmanian public schools, driven by the thought that students actually do miss out on something uniquely beneficial when they don’t bring the pieces together for assessments like NAPLAN. You’re spot on that we can and should consider this from the teacher perspective too. To my knowledge, a lot of work has gone into improving literacy instruction in Tasmanian schools, so it’s a shame that no NAPLAN scores will be reported this year, especially for the many teachers who have contributed to this work and deserve to see that progress reflected in the data.
I also agree that ‘keeping the house clean’ all year round with high-quality classroom instruction is the best way to achieve a straightforward, stressfree inspection when external assessments like NAPLAN come along. NAPLAN is regularly used to identify schools around the country that make better than expected gains, and teachers at these schools are virtually always delivering exactly this kind of instruction (as we see in encouraging newspaper articles each year). This just makes it even more disappointing that many Tasmanian schools will have no NAPLAN benchmarks to report this year!
In many areas of life, I’m a useless guide for my two boys (e.g., fixing the car, etc.), but I do take an active interest in their literacy development. I’ve come across a lot of parents who would like to support their children to write more effectively, but they don’t know how to make this happen. It’s with these parents in mind that I’ve been putting together a parents’ short course on NAPLAN writing that I hope to make available on my blog for free (it’s one of several projects for the long service leave I’m currently enjoying). It’ll replicate what I’ve done with my children, for what it’s worth. I’m designing it to complement what students are taught at school, but some teachers may also find the material valuable. It’s clear that every key adult in a child’s life should support their literacy development, and that we can’t expect children to teach themselves.
Thanks again for your valuable insights, Pam.