NATIONAL LITERACY AND NUMERACY TESTS

Mrs GERAGHTY (Torrens) (15:19): My question is to the Minister for Education. Can the minister please advise the house of the recent developments regarding this year's NAPLAN tests?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Minister for Education, Minister for Early Childhood Development) (15:20): I am pleased to advise the house that, starting earlier today, this year's National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy tests (the NAPLAN tests) are being conducted in year 3, 5, 7 and 9 classes across the state. The tests will be conducted in all schools in the state this week.

This of course comes after the AEU's decision last Thursday not to proceed with its proposed bans on this year's tests. As I made clear on numerous occasions (both publicly and privately) during the dispute with the AEU the government has always believed that banning the tests was the wrong approach to addressing the union's concerns about the use of data from those tests.

The NAPLAN tests are important for children and their progress at school. The tests help children and their parents measure their child's progress on key basic skills such as reading, writing, spelling, grammar and numeracy. They also help teachers to measure the progress of each child in their class and principals to check on programs across their schools to see how they are going and whether those programs are working for the children in their schools.

There is a particular reason why it was so important to go ahead with this year's tests. This year's tests provide the first set of NAPLAN tests that will permit you to see how children have progressed over two sets of tests. They have been running for three years now and because they run in every other year level you will have the capacity to measure an individual child's progress. That is something that parents are particularly interested in, and of course teachers and principals will be able to measure the improvement or otherwise since the last tests.

The tests are clearly valuable and to lose those benefits would have been a bad thing. It always seemed to me to be frankly illogical that one would seek to ban the tests because you were concerned about some collateral matter which was what you do with the results of those tests, which is the My School website debate. Even that issue in my view was based on a fear that is not well founded.

The government's view is that measuring the performance of students and schools is critical if we are going to improve our education system. If you can't measure it, how can you manage it? A key role for an education minister and an education agency must be to seek to improve the educational achievements of children. Measuring the performance of children across schools allows schools themselves to work out what they need to address and also allows governments to better assess the success of their policies and the curriculum areas on which they need to focus.

Measuring the performance of schools—and I think this is something that seems to have not been fully appreciated by those people that were opposing the My School website—allows us to better target the schools that are in need of additional assistance. It is incredibly counter-productive not to have this comparative data because this is the very data that allows us to say that these schools need some extra help.

The commonwealth is making funds available to those schools that have been identified as needing extra assistance. Of course, we need to be transparent about that process. That is why the community needs to see the data in the way in which it is presented on the My School website. That will improve the community's confidence in the way in which this system is managed. These are the points I sought to make to the AEU and they are the sorts of points that were made to the AEU by the commonwealth government.

Whilst we remained resolute in opposing the proposed bans and took action to ensure that the tests could continue and made these points, we did so in a way that was calculated not to inflame the dispute. I want to contrast that with the handy hints we were getting from the member for Unley which were all about inflaming the dispute. The Liberal Party is not known for being a great source of advice on industrial relations, but we did have the member for Unley suggesting that there should be compliance and that I should issue a direct order on each individual—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! I can't hear the minister.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: The member for Unley was suggesting that I should issue a direct order to each individual teacher and that then there should be a 'three strikes and you're out' policy which would allow me to sack the teachers who refused to participate in the tests. That would have been a recipe for mayhem in the schools. That was the prescription from the member for Unley. We were not going hard enough with the schools and therefore it was going to cause some problem for the NAPLAN test. Of course, the difficulty of restoring the relationship after you have gone down that path would have been substantial.

The measured approach that we took last week has yielded results. The tests will go ahead in all the schools. I am glad to see that common sense has prevailed. This will mean that South Australian parents, their children, teachers and principals will have access to this valuable information which will improve the education of our children.