A state education minister has called for annual literacy and numeracy tests to be scrapped because foreign companies were making money off Australian kids.
Primary and high school students in years three, five, seven and nine have been forced to sit annual NAPLAN tests since 2008.
Those National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy results have then been published on the national My School website to help parents decide on a potential school for their children.
A state education minister (Rob Stokes pictured) called for annual literacy and numeracy tests to be scrapped because foreign companies were making money off Australian kids
However, New South Wales Education Minister Rob Stokes has called for those tests to be scrapped because schools were coaching students on how to pass them to improve the ranking of their school.
‘You go to any bookstore and you look at teaching aids and they’re all about teaching to NAPLAN,’ he told Sydney radio broadcaster Alan Jones on Friday.
‘There’s some international companies making a lot of money out of Aussie students when we put a lot of taxpayers’ money, a lot of your listeners’ money, into ensuring there’s a greater public education system.
‘That should be sufficient. They shouldn’t have to go and spend additional on foreign resources.’
The federal government is conducting a review later this year into how NAPLAN results are published, following a call from Victorian and the Australian Capital Territory to change how the data is released.
Primary and high school students in years three, five, seven and nine have been forced to sit annual NAPLAN tests since 2008 (stock image)
However, federal Liberal Education Minister Simon Birmingham has slapped down his NSW Liberal counterpart’s call to scrap the NAPLAN tests.
‘We have to make sure that degree of transparency is still available in the future to Australian parents,’ he told reporters on Friday.
‘That’s why NAPLAN won’t be going away any time soon because it is an important deliverable in terms of giving Australian parents information about how their child is tracking.’
NAPLAN tests have been published six months after children have done the assessment, which Rob Stokes argued wasn’t helping teachers.
‘We’ve got better tools. We can do a better, more formative assessment that measures student growth,’ he said.
The NAPLAN tests debuted in 2008 two years before Julia Gillard went from being Education Minister to Prime Minister.
Those National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy results have then been published on the My School website to help parents decide on a potential school for their children (stock image)
However, federal Liberal Education Minister Simon Birmingham has slapped down his NSW Liberal counterpart’s call to scrap the NAPLAN tests