ABSTRACT
National Assessment Programme Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is a ‘census test’ and participation is mandated for all Australian schools that receive funding from the federal government. This chapter discusses the NAPLAN data for each of the schools in the author's study, focusing on bands and ‘results in numbers’ for 2008–14. The visual display on the My School website, and the reports that are sent to the school, show NAPLAN scores becoming ‘lighter’, indicating that students were performing as well as or better than students with ‘similar socio-educational backgrounds’ or ‘like schools’. In 2008, Year 3 students performed substantially better than students in similar schools on reading, spelling and punctuation and grammar. In 2014 scores for reading and for grammar and punctuation for each year level are on a par with ‘like schools’. The results for Year 7 reading suggest that those students are performing as well as Year 7 students in ‘like schools’, although still well below ‘all schools’.
