HOW 20 COAST SCHOOLS COMPARE
INDEPENDENT schools dominated the Year 3 and Year 9 sections of this year’s NAPLAN exams, claiming all but one of the top five spots in both lists.
A B Paterson College, St Hilda’s School, King’s Christian College and Coomera Anglican College were among the top schools when scores for reading, writing, spelling, grammar/punctuation and numeracy were totalled in Year 3.
The only state school in the top five was Broadbeach State School, which placed second last year.
Among the Year 9 totals, Somerset College, All Saints Anglican, Emmanuel, St Hilda’s and A B Paterson filled the top five placings. It was the same order as last year.
A B Paterson College principal Brian Grimes said his school had worked hard on developing specific programs to improve literacy and numeracy.
“One of the things we’ve worked on is using data ... to take results and map how students are going and see how effective the program is,” Mr Grimes said.
He said the school had focused on three things: staff training, targeted learning for all students and developing specialised programs beginning in prep.
Across the exam domains across Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, the school achieved a 100 per cent rate of performing above the national minimum standard in three-quarters of those areas, he said.
“To me NAPLAN is an important diagnostic and reflective tool, it’s not the sole measure of ... a school’s achievement,” he said.
Somerset College deputy headmaster Dr Michael Brohier said his school’s results could be credited to normalising literacy and numeracy skills into the general curriculum.
“What we do is we don’t focus on worrying about NAPLAN,” Dr Brohier said.
“We focus on teaching and learning as we go in there and do it well, and they’re less stressed. It’s normalised. We embed literacy and numeracy into our general curriculum.”
Dr Brohier said Year 3 and 5 went from strength to strength, but their Years 7 and 9 did “exceptionally well”.
“(Our Year 9 classes) were second in the state for writing, fifth in numeracy, ninth in reading, eighth for spelling and 13th for grammar,” he said.
Overall, Queensland posted some of its best-ever NAPLAN results, but Year 7 and 9 writing skills produced lower results.
Professor and Dean of Griffith University Donna Pendergast said the idea behind NAPLAN was to set an appropriate benchmark and to use it as a diagnostic tool.
“I think that the writing is a challenge that everyone’s grappling with,” she said.
“When I talk to literary experts, (the lower scores) potentially have to do with that we’ve changed what we teach in schools ... with the types of writing (learned) not reflected in tests.
“This is a really powerful tool but it only measures literacy and numeracy in narrow areas.
“As educators we’re keen to know what others are, like interpersonal skills of resilience ... it’s not the be all and end all.”
She said schools could improve with an intense strategy to writing, which schools scoring well in writing at NAPLAN were likely already doing.