RELEASE
4 May 2018
The NSW Teachers Federation supports NSW Education Minister, Rob Stokes’ call for the urgent scrapping of NAPLAN in its existing form and for it to be replaced by smaller, regular, formative assessments that focus on student progress.
The teaching profession also appreciates that NSW now has a bipartisan approach to the future of NAPLAN with Shadow Education Minister, Jihad Dib, endorsing Mr Stokes’ position and further calling for My School reporting to be completely wound back.
The President of the NSW Teachers Federation, Mr Maurie Mulheron, welcomed the developments and said,
"There is almost a universal consensus across the education community that NAPLAN is destructive, it’s crude, it encourages teaching to the test and it sits outside the curriculum and narrows what is taught. It is time for an entirely new approach to such assessment. One that puts students and quality learning at the centre".
The Teachers Federation commissioned research from Dr Les Perelman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [M.I.T.] that revealed NAPLAN as perhaps the lowest quality assessment of its type in the English-speaking world and was a possible contributing factor to declining performance standards in writing across the nation.
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