Fairholme backs up success at NAPLAN
FAIRHOLME College’s Year 5 students have recorded the second highest results in Queensland across reading, writing, spelling, grammar and numeracy.
The Year 5 cohort at Fairholme last year topped the state.
NAPLAN, an annual assessment for students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, tests “the sorts of skills that are essential for every child to progress through school and life, such as reading, writing, spelling and numeracy,” according to the National Assessment Program’s website.
The Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority released the results this week.
Fairholme College’s Head of Junior School Erin Tonscheck praised the girls’ test scores, but said they were not the focus of teachers’ work in classrooms.
“It’s a pleasant surprise, I suppose,” Mrs Tonscheck said. “We weren’t expecting it because it really is not our priority. If what we do at school is working really well, then good. NAPLAN results are really just a lovely by-product of what’s happening in the classroom. It’s not a target that we set.
“We think that teaching a child their social and emotional well-being skills, sporting, performing arts, all of those things alongside good academic teaching and critical creative thinking ... they’re the priorities. And if NAPLAN sees a benefit from that, then that’s a lovely thing that’s occurred. But we don’t teach to NAPLAN. We teach the Australian curriculum and we encourage our girls to be the best that they can.”
Year 5 students Grace Cornford, 10, and Rachel Yap, 10, yesterday reflected on the tests and their results, which, echoing Mrs Tonscheck’s sentiments, Grace described as a “nice surprise”.
“It’s good to know that we tried our hardest and we did very well as well,” agreed Rachel.
“I think it was a good experience and a good
❝ It’s good to know that we tried our hardest and we did very well as well.
— Rachel Yap, 10
learning experience because there were a lot of things that we had learnt in school and then some things that we hadn’t so we could just think ourselves and not have a teacher to tell us how to do it,” the articulate 10-year-old added.
Mrs Tonscheck said the school used NAPLAN results to determine trends and identify areas for improvement.
She attributed the school’s high test scores to “a range of things”.
“We have good teachers, we have fantastic girls, we have great families that are equally committed as well,” she said.
“I think that we have girls here for a long learning journey with us; many are starting with us as three-year-olds in kindergarten so we’ve had our girls for a long time and we work really hard around not just academic life ... We think that having the whole child being the best that she can is a better way to go.”
Grace and Rachel have two NAPLAN tests behind them, and another two to go - one in Year 7 and again in Year 9.