Say it with me again: NAPLAN is not the definitive measure of educational success

With students unable to log into the testing platform on Wednesday morning, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) issued statements, schools scrambled to communicate with parents, teachers stressed, and education ministers faced questions in parliament.

This bruhaha reflects the high-stakes atmosphere that has developed around NAPLAN.

Far from its original purpose as a tool to give teachers, parents, and system leaders a snapshot of students' progress on key learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy aligned to the Australian curriculum, NAPLAN drives so many aspects of schooling.

We now find some teachers feeling a need to teach to the test, some schools using it for marketing and marketshare purposes, some parents excessively worried about their children's futures, and some students so anxious they want to skip school in these weeks.

These pressures are exacerbated by careless media reporting and political point-scoring that lack nuance while caring more about readership and popularity.

As a diagnostic tool, NAPLAN provides valuable data for systems to help identify where cohorts of students are in their learning and where support is needed. It can also help parents understand how their children are progressing.

But given teachers continually assess what students know and can do through everyday classroom activities, the results often simply confirm their understanding of their students.

The pressure to produce ever-improving results is immense for many teachers, parents, and schools. Much of this stems from the way NAPLAN scores are used to rank schools, influencing enrolment patterns and parental choice.

ACARA chief executive Stephen Gniel recently criticised private schools that use NAPLAN scores in admissions processes.

Last year, he led an open letter urging media outlets to abandon the practice of turning NAPLAN data into simplistic league tables that ignore school context.

Media coverage has been a powerful amplifier of pressure.

Every year, headlines claim stagnation or decline in results. But research by Dr Sally Larsen shows long-term trends in NAPLAN and international tests do not indicate widespread decline; since 2000, only scores in PISA - an OECD test of 15 year olds' performance in maths, science and reading - have fallen consistently.

Importantly, while NAPLAN assesses curriculum-aligned knowledge, PISA measures applied skills - how students transfer what they learn to real-world problems. Put simply, performance on NAPLAN does not guarantee students will succeed outside the school environment.

NAPLAN data also highlight a persistent equity gap. On average, students from low SES backgrounds, rural and remote areas, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students score lower in NAPLAN than their more advantaged peers and are far more likely to fall short of proficiency targets. But as research has shown, this gap is not so much an issue of teachers' or students' capacities as it is one of structural inequities in society that must be better addressed.

Despite decades of attention and investment, this equity gap remains stubborn.

The 2019 Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration sets ambitious goals for all young Australians: promoting equity and excellence, and ensuring confident, creative, lifelong learners and active community members.

Raising NAPLAN scores won't achieve these aims.

While NAPLAN can be a useful diagnostic tool and contributes valuable data for policy and research, it must not be treated as the definitive measure of educational success.

As recently argued by the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE), Australian schooling sits at an important juncture. Evidence-informed practice is widely recognised by state and federal policy makers as key to producing change. It is essential that evidence-based education is not constrained by narrow definitions of evidence or success.

In a world increasingly shaped by AI, climate change, and global instability, our education system must prioritise producing intelligent, creative, empathetic young people - not just high scorers on NAPLAN.