Adjournment: Schools - literacy and numeracy

Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) -- My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Education. It regards the so-called Australian schools index and the policy of naming and shaming schools who perform below the average in national literacy and numeracy testing which are then published on the 'My School' website.

Ms Pike has stated she is against simplistic school league tables, but she has done nothing to prevent the NAPLAN (national assessment program literacy and numeracy) test results of Victorian schools from being included on the federal government's 'My School' website. Information on the website provides the data necessary to construct league tables.

Newspapers like Hobart's Mercury and Brisbane's Courier Mail have already published such tables and other media organisations will surely follow. A report released on 27 January 2010 by the Grattan Institute, an independent educational think tank, concluded that the information on the 'My School' website is:

... prone to mismeasurement and may be biased against schools serving lower socioeconomic communities ...
In May last year a leading Australian educator, Professor Brian Caldwell, called on the nation's education ministers to scrap plans to publish information which compared schools. He said it would not give parents the information they needed and could stigmatise some schools, especially disadvantaged government schools.

I have looked at the 'My School' website, and I do not believe it provides information to parents that it is any more valuable than what is already available on the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development website. Nor does it supply more comprehensive information about the progress of children than the schools themselves.

The information on the 'My School' website is based only on the results of the NAPLAN tests. Years 5, 7 and 9 numeracy tests are not designed to rank students, let alone teachers or schools. The tests are crude measures of accomplishments in spelling, reading, grammar and maths. Results are being misused on the 'My School' website for a purpose for which they are not designed. They say nothing of the quality of teaching in these areas or other educational achievements.

The federal government's website will undermine confidence in schools that have low scores, even though many of them are doing an excellent job in difficult circumstances, including having a lack of resources. It will force teachers to sacrifice time spent on other important curriculum areas to teach students about the tests to boost scores.

Julia Gillard, the Deputy Prime Minister and federal Minister for Education, has urged parents to have robust discussions with teachers in schools which perform below the average. In my opinion this is unconscionable. The 'My School' website is not a measure of transparency, because it includes only an average snapshot of the performance of a whole year level on a narrow test on a particular day. It is not accountable, because it does not hold federal and state governments accountable for the growing inequities between schools and students -- which they preside over -- due to the inequitable funding and resourcing of schools. This is why teachers, principals and educational experts are opposing them.

My request to the minister is that she refuse to hand over future NAPLAN test results to her federal counterpart until steps are taken to prevent the construction of simplistic league tables of data.