Wednesday, 13 August 2025

 Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:52): I am delighted today to rise to speak on the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office (VAGO) report on literacy and numeracy achievement outcomes for Victorian students. I realise that this report was tabled last year. It is extremely important that we acknowledge the Auditor-General’s comments about education in this state, which, in spite of my opponent across the chamber there and in light of the state budget and NAPLAN itself, is in a state of shambles for many schools. The VAGO report has made a critical assessment of the department’s effectiveness in improving literacy and numeracy outcomes for Victorian government school students in particular. It highlights a concerning trend of stagnant overall achievement since 2012 and, more critically, a widening achievement gap for Aboriginal students and students experiencing disadvantage. With all the bravado that goes on across the chamber, this report further criticises the department’s current reporting practices, finding that it is not a fair or transparent presentation of students’ skills.

Interestingly, in August last year, the Minister for Education said in a media release:

This year, Victoria’s NAPLAN participation rate was the highest it has been since the first year of testing in 2008.

What a ridiculous statement. With significant increases in migration and obvious population growth in Victoria, it ignores the fact that from 2023 there has been a significant change as well in the NAPLAN reporting measures. It hides the truth of our education system in this state. If we look at the NAPLAN reporting changes, from 2008 to 2022 results were reported on a 10-band scale. Everybody was familiar with it; we had been using it for years and years and years. But from 2023 onwards, with this government, the transition was to online testing and new proficiency standards. The report format had changed, and results are not directly comparable to pre-2023 reports; results from 2023 onwards will be comparable only to each other. So this reset in reporting highlights the need for the department to establish clear ongoing reporting frameworks for the new proficiency standards.

VAGO made three recommendations to the department, two of which have been accepted, with the last only accepted in principle. They accepted the following: to widen its literacy reporting to include writing as well as reading and that the department’s reporting of literacy is too narrow – they actually accepted this; fancy thinking that they could actually take writing out as something that we could test to determine whether our students are actually able to write fluently and correctly – and, secondly, to improve the way they report student outcomes in its performance measures. The issue here is that the department’s budget performance measures are not a fair representation of student outcomes. The other concern here is the focus on high achievers. Reporting tends to highlight high-achieving students, focusing on the proportion of students that are scoring in the top two and three NAPLAN bands. This obscures the struggles of those less likely to meet expected levels and those who most need learning support. What would be great with the NAPLAN test is for us to be able to see that data so that teachers and schools can actually implement the things that they need to have changed. As a result they have to do a lot of their own testing. In other countries, like Finland, where they do not even do a lot of testing until students are a lot older, this is putting significant additional pressure on some schools.

There are schools that I know train their students up for NAPLAN, and they focus on it because they know that these results are going to be made public. That is not always the whole point of having a NAPLAN test either, because there are other schools that are having to focus on a number of other things. At this point I would like to throw in there that this state, the state of Victoria, does not have enough select entry schools. In fact if you look at New South Wales, they have something like 24 select entry schools. We only have five, and up until a number of years ago, we only had two, a male and a female select gender school. Absence of reporting on below-expected levels – the department does not publicly report on these, and students who are below the expected level are disadvantaged, and schools and teachers are as well.

I really encourage the government to take another look at NAPLAN and to be a lot more transparent with the results so that we can have better outcomes in our schools.