Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of the coalition to support the report and recommendations of the effectiveness of the national assessment program literacy and numeracy. Knowing that my Senate colleagues, Senator Wright and Senator McKenzie, do want to contribute, I will confine my remarks. The first thing to say is that the coalition supports the report and its recommendations. All of us on the committee particularly support shortening the interval between when the NAPLAN test is taken and when the results come back. Of course, with new technologies we believe these capacities exist with online testing. One of the things I do want to emphasise, however, is that, whilst in government, we will work closely with the states and the territories, the Catholic sector and the independent schools, to make sure that the technologies and the equipment are in place so that if and when we move to an online testing platform then we do not add to students' anxiety because the computers are breaking down or because they do not have access to them in the first place or because they do not have the capacity to use them. That is one of the recommendations I endorse.

The second point feeds on from that: there are special problems for students with disabilities or students from a non-English-speaking background. We would be urging ACARA that the nature of the testing, the questions being asked, are those that students from a non-English-speaking background or those who may be new to this country have some understanding of the actual question being asked and that they are not left at the starting gates simply because they do not understand the background or the nature of the question. If we do want, as Senator Lines says, this to become a diagnostic tool that is of some use to a teacher then there is not much point of doing the test in March or April and getting the results in October. But in the meantime, of course, it prompts the question, 'Should the results be available to that student's teacher in the next year?' because the information may still be relevant to that teacher in grasping some understanding.

What the government does not support is the notion of league tables—inevitably the media, the newspapers in particular, love to get hold of the information that comes from the My School website and start producing league tables—but we cannot stop that happening and we do not intend to stop it happening. I think the message that needs to go out there is that this is not the basis upon which decisions are going to be made relating to either funding or resourcing. What is necessary is to use the results themselves, and the feedback from principals, to allow principals of schools to have far more autonomy in their decision making, while particularly including the parents, the teachers and the school community.

We do not want a circumstance in which pupils are pressured in going into this NAPLAN testing for fear that, if they do it badly in some way, their school is going to be disadvantaged—and we have seen evidence of that. Neither do we want a circumstance in which teachers teach to the test, out of fear induced in them by the bureaucracy or administration that, if somehow or other there is a poor performance by pupils, the school is going to be disadvantaged. That has encouraged some, indeed, to leave the students at home.

I propose to conclude my remarks there to allow time for my colleagues to make a contribution. I will simply say that we certainly endorse the report and its recommendations.