Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was the deputy chair of the Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee. It was very ably chaired by Senator Chris Back. I will say at the outset that while I am no longer a member of the Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee, I had been on that committee for many years. We approached these inquiries generally in a very bipartisan manner and this inquiry was no exception. I commend Senator Back.

NAPLAN is an issue that has created quite a bit of public controversy. It was appropriate for the Senate to conduct this inquiry. I will come to some of the findings of the inquiry in a moment. Senator Mason and myself, during Senate estimates over many years, went through some of the details of NAPLAN testing. He is one of the senators on the other side who I readily concede has a very deep and genuine commitment to education. Let us put to one side some of his more wacky ideas, of course. But, on the whole, I know he has a very genuine commitment to education.

We have talked about these issues. The report reinforced a number of the things that we have been discussing in Senate estimates over many years: the need for us as a nation to have a measurement process, a benchmarking process not only for students but for our schools. We need to ensure that as a nation we are providing the best education we possibly can to all of our kids no matter where they are. NAPLAN is a very useful tool to identify areas of weakness and areas of need so the governments can address those issues on a needs basis. If you do not collect the evidence, if you do not collect the results and if you do not test our kids on the skills they are learning at school, how can you have a system which plugs those holes and addresses those needs?

We have seen some other countries go down retrograde steps with this sort of testing, where they have punished schools or jurisdictions for not performing to a higher level. That has been one of the criticisms that opponents of the NAPLAN have argued very strongly. But when this system was set up, the then opposition, now government, was very supportive. This is not a tool to be used as a punishment on systems or schools. It is one which we use to identify weaknesses so we can put more money if necessary, if that is what it takes, into those areas to lift the standard or provide more teaching resources or even better teaching resources for better standards. NAPLAN testing is a very useful tool for policy makers to continue to develop an education policy.

One thing I think we all agree on in this place is that education is the genesis of our future economic prosperity. If we wish to compete in a globalised world, we will do so because of the cleverness and the enterprise of our people. Education is the key to all enterprise and it is the key to all innovation. Without that framework and without getting it right at the lowest level, at even the preschool level, we do not set ourselves up for being the knowledge nation we will need to be when we are competing over the next decades with people in our region. That is not to say there are not some flaws with NAPLAN; there are. There is a lot of work going on in making the results more readily available and more quickly available to schools, to teachers and to students. First and foremost, NAPLAN is a tool to measure overall performance.

Individual assessment of students goes on every day in the classroom. Every teacher every day is constantly assessing their students through personal contact and through tests they do at the school. Teachers do not need to rely on NAPLAN to understand how their students are performing or whether they are attaining the levels that we expect in the delivery of the curriculum. NAPLAN was not really a tool to enable teachers to do that on an individual basis. It was more of a globalised policy response to ensure that where there is need identified, we put in the resources.

One of the flaws of NAPLAN, which came out in the inquiry and which I know from my personal knowledge talking to teachers and principals, is that there is a lot of pressure in some schools on some teachers to try and teach to the test. In fact, they become obsessed with trying to get a good NAPLAN result. I think that is unfortunate and detracts from what the NAPLAN is able to achieve for us as policy makers. When we have had ACARA before us in Senate estimates, they make it very clear that NAPLAN is presented in such a way where it is impossible to teach to the test because it is a test of skills attained. It is not a question-and-answer test on the knowledge you have collected over a period of time, so it is an incredibly difficult test to teach to if that is what you want to do. But we do know it happens in some jurisdictions. State jurisdictions put enormous pressure on the schools to lift their overall NAPLAN results as well. The state education bureaucracies put enormous pressure on the principal, who then transfers that pressure down to the teachers and then the teachers are under pressure to teach to the test.

We know kids pick up on these issues. I say that as a parent as well. When they know the teacher is under pressure to perform under NAPLAN and they are teaching to the test, the students inevitably pick up that pressure too, and all of a sudden it becomes something that it was never supposed to be—that is, a high-stakes, high-pressure environment. It ought not be that.

We should never pretend that our kids should not be tested in schools. They should be tested. We are going to be tested as adults on a regular basis and we cannot pretend we are not going to put our kids through some of that pressure. You are going to have pressure when you go for job interviews. You are going to have pressure at all sorts of levels throughout your working life. We cannot pretend there is not going to be pressure. Students should also be tested on the skills they are attaining because it helps us as policymakers to direct funding where funding is most needed.

So if there are flaws with NAPLAN, what we seriously need to be doing is looking at the delivery of NAPLAN and the way the education departments—and some do it better than others—put that pressure on the kids. I was lucky enough that where my kids go to school—they go to public schools—the principals have the philosophy that it should not be a high-stakes, high-pressure test. I know by talking to those teachers that that did not come through from the top. It was simply another test, an important test: 'We will have some practice tests, and that is absolutely appropriate. But we will not drill, day after day, and spend week upon week, month upon month, practicing for something that is really "unpracticable" according to ACARA.'

I do recommend some of the issues that the committee recommended. I commend ACARA for working very well in trying to get the online marking process so that what results there are can be used by schools in a more useful way. But what the committee did conclude is that, given the time constraints in the last parliament, we did not have enough time to really do this issue justice. There is concern in the community, and I would encourage the Senate at some point to commence another inquiry to finish the work that the committee started in the last parliament. We want to hear from parents, we want to hear from the public, we want to hear from educators; we want to hear how we can make it better for policymakers. After all, we invest an enormous amount of money in our future and in our kids. We have an obligation and a responsibility to ensure that we get best value for that. That is so crucial to where we sit in a globalised world. Whether we maintain our prosperity or whether we do not, it all starts with education.