Page 2249 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 4 August 2021
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opportunity today to provide an update to the Assembly on the government’s progress on implementing the agreed recommendations of the Ninth Assembly standing committee inquiries into standardised testing and bullying and violence, and also on the great work being done in our schools.
The government welcomed the final reports from both of these inquiries and agreed to 28 recommendations. Since these two inquiries were handed down in 2018 and 2019 respectively, the government has been taking action on all of the agreed recommendations.
As the Assembly will know, updates on inquiry recommendations are included annually in the directorate’s annual report, and I refer my colleagues to the Education Directorate annual report for more detailed reporting against each of the recommendations.
I can update the Assembly that, in relation to the standardised testing inquiry, the government continues to implement the seven “agreed” or “agreed in principle” recommendations, and has completed one of the recommendations at the end of the last financial year.
A number of the committee’s final recommendations relate to NAPLAN and the national discussions about the Australian curriculum. NAPLAN testing provides a snapshot of a student’s progress at a point in time and is one of many tools used to assess and further their learning. It is a narrow point in time assessment that provides information about only a few subjects among all of the learning happening in our schools. Results are used in many ways to learn more about a student’s learning journey, but the aim of this tool is not to compare schools and jurisdictions.
As part of the NAPLAN process, parents and carers receive two reports. One report compares each child’s achievement with students in the same year level across Australia, whilst the second report provides information on each child’s responses to the skills tested.
This year, student reports will be distributed in September. Parents can use the information as a trigger for a conversation with their child’s teacher or principal about their school’s approach to learning. ACT teachers know their students, and no dataset can replace visiting your local school, meeting with school leaders, teachers and support staff and learning more about the school culture. The government continues to participate in the national discussions about the Australian curriculum and review of NAPLAN, including encouraging efforts to ensure reports to schools and parents can be provided as quickly as possible.
For some time the government has had concerns about the index of community socio-educational advantage, ICSEA, used in the similar schools model creating a bias in interjurisdictional comparisons of NAPLAN performance for the ACT. Last year education ministers agreed to a project to explore the operation of the socio-educational advantage index in the ACT to determine if there were any anomalies that may affect comparisons with ACT schools. Early signs are that observed differences, which have been widely reported, may be more a measurement
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