Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise in the remaining two minutes to make some very brief comments on the report of the Senate Education and Employment References Committee inquiry into the effectiveness of the NAPLAN program. I support wholeheartedly the chair's comments around what actually makes a difference in the classroom, to teachers and to educational outcomes for students, and that is: quality teaching and a degree of autonomy and flexibility at the local level to have a look around and adopt practices that will actually support the learning and development of our young people.

Obviously, Senator Back, we support the use of NAPLAN. It has provided an incredible amount of data for both state and federal governments to put on the table when designing their education policy. What we will be looking at—and this was one of the recommendations that came out of our inquiry—is the need to get the data into the classroom a lot quicker, so that teachers can adapt their pedagogy appropriately to the students in their classroom. That is what the test was designed to do, and ensuring that that time frame is shortened is a positive measure—and we support that state education ministers have set 2016 as the date for them to start looking at that, and we look forward to that. So we are not going to rush in to 'NAPLAN online', if you like, as a potential mechanism for doing that. That could be quite an adaptive process for young people and teachers to assess their numeracy and literacy, but it is going to take time. We are going to work comprehensively with state government and Catholic and independent systems to ensure that we get it right, so that we can make good decisions.

I just want to briefly comment on the need for increased support for student teachers and teachers in analysing and interpreting the quantitative data that comes out of NAPLAN.

I just wanted to make a brief comment on the Greens' additional comments around the creation of league tables and to reiterate the fact that the coalition does not support league tables. That is not what the tool was designed to do, nor should it be used for that. But we cannot stop media outlets, for instance, and other organisations using their numeracy skills with the data available to construct comparison data, nor would we want to.

Finally, I wanted to briefly touch on the fact that the department of the former Minister for Education in Tasmania, Greens Minister McKim, supported NAPLAN. (Time expired)

Debate interrupted.