Education in our upper Kedron Brook valley is not rosy. Only one school in our whole valley has good NAPLAN results. What is going to be done to improve the situation in future now we know about it? This is the future of our children and the future of our community that we are talking about.
I spoke to one local teacher about it and was astounded at the response although it fits closely with the resistence from the Teachers’ Union. Basically it was along the lines of “We ignore NAPLAN results.” Does that mean that teachers and school principals locally aren’t concerned and acting urgently to address the poor educational outcomes that the NAPLAN results have uncovered?
There are basically three approaches that can be taken to bad NAPLAN results and all are happening in Australia right now.
[ul]Some schools are cheating by identifying their worst-performing students and instructing them to stay home on the NAPLAN testing days. If anyone hears of this happening the thing to do is speak up about it. Identify the cheating schools or teachers.
Teaching ‘to NAPLAN’ is happening. Teaching resources are appearing in shops to give students practice materials to work on. Personally if it helps students spell and write grammatically and to be numerate I think it is better than nothing.
Then there is what we want to happen. The areas of short-coming now identified are addressed and improvements made so that the student learning outcomes the following year improve.
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