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Parents critical of NAPLAN are being blamed for an increase in the number of students not sitting the benchmark tests.
According to the 2014 NAPLAN report, released on Wednesday, the level of withdrawals, where a child was deliberately kept from sitting the tests, were at an all-time high.
The withdrawal rate for Year 3 reading recorded one of the steepest rises, up almost 1 per cent since 2010 to 2.7 per cent.
Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) chief executive Dr Stanley Rabinowitz said this year marked the graduation of the so-called NAPLAN generation - the first group of children in Australia to sit the NAPLAN tests in years 3, 5, 7 and 9.
He said it was a milestone in the program's seven-year history.
"For the first time we can track that same class [through years] 3, 5, 7 and 9," he said.
"After all these years we can do something that we've never been able to do before, we can provide individual data and trend data."
Year 9 student Charlotte Trent is part of the NAPLAN generation and said the testing was "just another day at school".
The 14-year-old said although her teachers used to prepare her and her classmates for the tests, she never gave them much thought.
She also said she found receiving the results was beneficial.
"It gave me an idea of either what I needed to work on or what my strengths were compared to the rest of the people in my grade," Charlotte said.
"One year, I think it was Year 7, I noticed a lot of people in my class were better at English than I was but I was in the top band for maths.
"So it was kind of interesting to see how the people in the same school differed and also to see how I compared to the rest of the year throughout New South Wales and Australia."
But the data is not a complete picture of education levels in Australia.
NAPLAN 'pressures' and 'stresses' children
Parent Peter Anderson is critical of the tests. His 12-year-old son, Max, is in Year 6 and has never sat a NAPLAN test.
"A term is basically wasted drilling for NAPLAN," Mr Anderson said.
"There's a lot of pressure put on the kids in the class.
"There's a lot of drilling. There's a lot of days and days and days just doing NAPLAN stuff when they could be learning something useful.
"It just didn't seem to make a lot of sense to us to put Max through all the stress – as a six-, seven- or eight-year-old – of doing a test that didn't make any difference."
Tests 'should not be traumatic'
ACARA's Dr Rabinowitz said some parents' objections were a concern because it meant NAPLAN data was not as complete as it could be.
"Every student should know how well he or she is doing against the standards, against his or her peers," he said.
"Parents who do not allow their children to sit for this test are not getting the benefit of a second set of eyes on how well their students, their children, are doing. Schools are not getting that benefit."
Dr Rabinowitz dismissed suggestions parents were withdrawing their children because the NAPLAN tests were too hard or traumatic.
"This is just another event in their lives, it's important but it should not be traumatic," he said.
ACARA also recorded four incidents in 2014 where schools in Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory pressured parents to withdraw their children from the tests.
Australian Parents Council's Ian Dalton said he has heard of dozens more cases where parents were asked to keep underperforming children at home on NAPLAN testing days.
"I've probably heard of around about 15 to 20 instances," he said.
"Normally it's explained in terms that it might be too stressful for the child or that on that particular day the sort of test that they're doing won't be suitable for that child.
"In many cases I think we would have to doubt that because the process of going through the NAPLAN experience isn't stressful."
Gap in numeracy scores narrow in high school
The 2014 NAPLAN report revealed the levels of literacy and numeracy achievement across years 3, 5, 7 and 9 were steady on last year's results.
"For most year levels and most content areas [there has been] relatively stable performance," Dr Rabinowitz said.
"But that doesn't mean individual students haven't grown significantly or individual schools haven't done very well, relative to other schools."
Girls outperformed boys in the areas of reading, writing, punctuation and spelling, achieving higher mean scale scores across the country.
Boys tended to do better than girls in numeracy, especially in Year 3.
But the gap in numeracy scores between the sexes narrowed considerably among Year 7 and Year 9 students.
Parental education and occupation continued to have a big impact on children's scores with students whose parents were classed as senior managers or qualified professionals achieving the highest mean scale scores in all content areas.
There was also a statistically significant drop in the reading level of Indigenous students in years 3 and 5 but Dr Rabinowitz said Indigenous students were still improving at a faster rate, overall, than non-Indigenous students.
"If you just looked at the average score you would have no good news," he said.
"But when we look at the trend data we see that we are observing a relative increase in performance for our Indigenous students."
The NAPLAN test will move online in 2017 and will tailor the questions to become harder or easier, according to an individual student's ability as he or she progresses through the test.
Topics: education, secondary-schools, primary-schools, australia
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