NAPLAN-What do the results tell you?
NAPLAN results are beginning to arrive in schools, but what do they tell you about your child’s learning journey?
NAPLAN was developed as a national benchmarking tool to monitor whether students are gaining the essential skills in literacy and numeracy throughout their schooling. Students in Years 3, 5, 7, and 9 complete the assessment over several days in March, demonstrating their abilities in reading, writing, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and numeracy. These results are intended to inform parents, schools, and government entities about student progress and areas for support.
In recent years, NAPLAN reporting has shifted to a four-band scale to report student progress:
Needs Additional Support
Developing
Strong
Exceeding
Your child’s NAPLAN report will also include national and state averages, allowing you to see how your child compares to peers across the country.
A mark indicating ‘Needs Additional Support’ or ‘Developing’ may suggest an unmet learning need or highlight that current support strategies may require adjustment to better meet the child’s needs.
Teachers work tirelessly to provide the best possible outcomes for every student in their care. While NAPLAN provides valuable insights, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Meeting with your child’s teacher to compare NAPLAN data with classroom assessments and day-to-day performance is essential. Some children may have had an off day during the assessment. For others, lower results may reflect a deeper need for learning support. Teacher feedback, NAPLAN results, your child’s school report and your own observations each contribute a vital piece to the bigger picture when considering whether further assessment or support may be needed.
Speech pathologists can play a critical role in supporting children within education teams. While speech sound errors are often noticeable in conversation, language and literacy difficulties can be harder to detect and may have an even greater impact on a child’s learning. Poor NAPLAN performance may be one sign that a child is experiencing language or literacy challenges beneath the surface. As language and literacy are the foundation of all learning, difficulties in these areas can have far-reaching effects on academic achievement, confidence, and emotional wellbeing.
While NAPLAN can provide a snapshot of learning, it cannot capture the full picture. For children with learning difficulties, additional assessments are essential to identify individual needs and create targeted, meaningful goals that support learning across all areas.
If you have concerns about your child’s speech, language, or literacy skills, I invite you to reach out. Early identification and support can make a lasting difference.
Click here to book a 15 min discovery phone call with me where together, we can decide whether further investigation from a speech, language or literacy perspective is needed.
Melanie Broadbent - Speech Pathologist