Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I present a report of the Senate Education and Employment References Committee on matters referred to the committee during the previous parliament. I seek leave to move a motion.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

As we know, certainly from the Gonski panel, literacy and numeracy are incredibly important and are key within our education system. What we know from Gonski is that Australia's educational standards have fallen behind, particularly over the last 10 years, and that too many young people leave school and are functionally illiterate. This means that these young people are unable to compete on an equal footing for jobs that offer fulfilling and ongoing employment. They are also unable to compete on an equal footing for career based opportunities such as traineeships or apprenticeships. What we are seeing is that far too many young people are missing out. As a Western Australian senator, I know that in some of our key manufacturing areas in the Kwinana strip youth unemployment is at appallingly high levels. Some of this is due to young people leaving schools inadequately skilled, particularly in literacy and numeracy.

Falling literacy standards not only affect young people's career opportunities but also slow them down in other areas. For example, falling standards prevent young people from getting drivers licences as they are unable to sit the tests. In some communities in Western Australia additional funding has been made available so that young people can be tutored one on one to prepare them to sit for drivers licence tests. But we should ensure that our schools are well funded so young people leave school with all the skills required to be successful in life, rather than having to seek tutoring. Young people find it embarrassing to acknowledge that they do not understand a basic form or cannot read it to a sufficient level to complete it competently. From a West Australian perspective, having a driver licence is critical because most young people in my state drive to their places of employment.

In this inquiry into NAPLAN, the committee thought it was not appropriate to take on trust or assume that we are getting the best from our schools. It is sad that the government thinks that requiring schools to deliver good standards and be accountable for these good standards is centralised, Big Brother-type interference. If we are going to commit billions of taxpayer dollars to our schools then we need to ensure that schools are accountable, that teachers are the best they can be and that teachers are properly supported through access to ongoing education. Also, we as the Australian public and taxpayers want public accountability. That is what NAPLAN tests are designed to do. They test primary school students in years 3 and 5 and secondary school students in year 9. Despite criticism, it is appropriate that schools undergo some national testing as long as supports are in place—there are quality teachers, quality principals and quality systems that are well supported and funded.

We are a young nation when it comes to European settlement. We want to compete on a global stage. To do that, we need a first-class education system, whether public or private. The system should deliver what our students needs. Australian taxpayers and parents want accountability from our schools and our children to be much more than functionally literate. We want our children to succeed and their school years to be the best they can be. We want young people to have a lot of opportunity and to experience a broad range of educational and other activities through their schools. That requires us to be diligent in telling schools that performance needs to be measured. We cannot tell if we are succeeding by taking on good faith that schools are doing well.

The only other measure we have is the personal measure when children in year 12 sit their high school certificate and apply for entrance to university. That is not a real measure of the success of our schools. It is a measure of the performance of individuals against a standardised test. It is therefore appropriate for us to have national testing and it is important for us to make sure that national testing meets our needs—that it is adequate and reports in a way that is fair, while it identifies the real issues within our system. There was some criticism of the current NAPLAN testing and questions about whether it meets its objectives, but NAPLAN testing has not been in place for long. There has also been some controversy about reporting of testing on the My School website and the possibility of creating league tables. However, to the best of my knowledge that has not happened and parents appreciate having the opportunity to look at how their school measures up against other schools with similar socioeconomic factors.

Safeguards and protocols exist, but as the committee did not give many organisations and groups an opportunity to contribute to the inquiry, it is appropriate for us to continue that work. We should always be prepared to revisit this area. It is not appropriate for members of parliament and senators to say we had an inquiry into NAPLAN and so it is done and dusted. It is something we should revisit as often as necessary, and certainly every couple of years, to make sure the rigour we want in our system exists and the accountability we expect in our education system is there. But most importantly it is to make sure that our education system is delivering to our young people so that young people leave school not just functionally literate but ready and able to take on whatever it is that they see their future as, to take on fulfilling careers, to be able to sit very easily for their driver's test and pass, to be able to move in our society and to be part of a functioning society.

I certainly would recommend the report to the parliament. Our work on that committee is not finished and we are seeking the opportunity to continue that work. I will leave those comments for later.

Question agreed to.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the report into NAPLAN. I also was a committee member at that stage of the Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee. It is really interesting to note that there were no recommendations from this committee as such, but it was suggested, as Senator Marshall has suggested, that this committee look again at how NAPLAN is going, because we need to do more work in that area. We did not have enough time back in June to go any further than a two-day hearing. Senator Back chaired the committee and I support Senator Marshall in saying that Senator Back was a very good chair of that committee. I thoroughly enjoyed working with him.

NAPLAN is an annual assessment of Australian students, and it happens when they are in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. They are tested in the areas of reading, writing, language and literacy. I think I am the only person in this chamber—or in fact in this parliament—that actually was a hands-on childcare worker. So, as an ex-childcare worker, I really understand the value of education.

When I was in the childcare industry we used to do programs for individual children. What I see with NAPLAN is that that is really an extension of what is happening there. Individual students and schools can learn how they are going through the NAPLAN process, and then the schools and the teachers can work to fill any gaps that might be there. We all know that if you are lacking in those really basic areas of reading, writing, language and literacy, your life is going to be much more difficult. Coming from Tasmania, where there is a high rate of literacy problems and concerns, I think it is really important that we keep pushing to have NAPLAN testing continue.

The tests have been conducted every year since 2008, in May. A few months later, around September, the results are made available publically on the My School website and at an individual school level. Over a million students complete three separate tests over a week every year. These results are published online and also reported in the media. That has caused a bit of controversy, because some people agree with NAPLAN and of course there are some people who do not. But I think it is really important in Australia—and we have seen this with a number of reports—where educational standards have fallen. To be a competitive society we need to make sure that we can compete everywhere, and the best way to do that is to make sure that people are able to compete in the job market. If you do not have those basic skills of reading, writing, language and literacy then you will find it much harder to compete in the job market.

We see that once again in my home state of Tasmania, where the youth unemployment is at really high levels and a lot of that has to do with the fact that the education processes do not always meet the needs of the students. NAPLAN to me is a bit like doing a skills audit, and it is really important that we make sure that people are skilled up. Schools also need to be really well equipped and well funded, and we are going to have a few discussions on that possibly later this week but certainly over time with regard to the concerns about Gonski.

We need to do NAPLAN tests, because we need to know what areas students are lacking in. If you do not know what areas the students are lacking in, then of course you cannot help fill the gaps. I think Senator Marshall said that some people have not been very happy with NAPLAN, but ACARA had this to say in the report about NAPLAN tests:

… (ACARA) submitted that the National Assessment Program 'is the means by which governments, education authorities and schools can determine whether or not young Australians are reaching important educational goals for literacy and numeracy'.

I do not think that anyone would argue that we really need to know what those levels are. The report went on to say:

On its website ACARA advises that the primary objective of NAPLAN is to provide the:

[M]easure through which governments, education authorities, schools, teachers and parents can determine whether or not young Australians have the literacy and numeracy skills that provide the critical foundation for other learning and for their productive and rewarding participation in the community.

The tests provide parents and schools with an understanding of how individual students are performing at the time of the tests. They also provide schools, states and territories with information about how education programs are working and which areas need to be prioritised for improvement.

I wish to reiterate that it is really important that we have a program such as NAPLAN, because if the gaps start as low as grade 3, even earlier, then you have got a problem with learning, especially for young children trying to catch up. You see this in high schools quite frequently where children have been left behind. One thing the Labor government was very determined to do was to make sure that no child was left behind in the education stakes.

The committee heard some concerns that over time the purpose of NAPLAN has expanded. I think this is partly because the NAPLAN data is our only nationally consistent data for educational outcomes. Before NAPLAN, we did not have that sort of data collection service and so we did not get the whole picture. We got the picture in some schools and for some individual students but we never had it for schools as a whole and we certainly did not have a national picture. I think it is really important for the future of Australia to make sure that everyone can fully participate in society and to ensure that we pick up any problems as early as we can.

I gave a speech not that long ago in this place about literacy levels in Tasmania and how difficult it was for many adults who cannot read and write. In everyday life they have difficulty filling out bank forms or being able to read labels or boxes in supermarkets. I think if some of these adults had been caught early on, if the system had identified them and helped them to correct those problems, then they would probably have a much better lifestyle. It is one of those areas that there is disagreement about, but it is also very important for us to keep working on it.

I noticed in the report that there was encouragement for the new parliament to recommend to the Senate the re-adoption of this inquiry early in this parliament. As I said, we only had two days for the inquiry and we held meetings in Melbourne in June. I would also endorse Senator Marshall's words about ensuring that that happens.

A lot of the disagreement around NAPLAN was not necessarily about the testing per se but about how the data might be used. People gave evidence that they were concerned about how the data was used and that it might disadvantage particular schools. The criticism did not actually disagree with testing per se. When you go out in the real world, once you have left school, you will be tested on everything, from getting your driver's licence to job interviews—a range of things. You need those skills. You need to be confident about being tested and it is a very important process. I have not heard from anyone in my home state that their children have been stressed by the process. For all the reasons I have outlined, it is very important that we keep NAPLAN going and that we also encourage this parliament to continue the testing. (Time expired)

Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time for debate on the motion has expired.

Question agreed to.