Parents sweating on kids swotting won't foster inspiration

Since the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy was introduced in 2008, schools have felt the pressure to perform in the large-scale diagnostic test that years 3, 5, 7 and 9 students sit each May across the country.

That pressure is covertly, and sometimes overtly, passed down to the students.

There's been past anecdotal and, thankfully, isolated evidence suggesting some principals have felt it is in their school's best interest if certain children stay home on testing day. Certainly schools are spending a lot more classroom time focusing on the sorts of tasks that students are required to do during their literacy and numeracy assessment.

It's little wonder that parents get NAPLAN nerves as much as their offspring do when May creeps around and many of them are resorting to home coaching and swot books to get them through.

Hinkler Publishing reports that its NAPLAN-style workbooks have sold out four times since they went to press in December.

But how has it come to this?

NAPLAN was always meant to be a snapshot of performance on a given day to guide schools - and, more importantly, governments - on how to improve literacy and numeracy teaching and learning.

Five years on, NAPLAN testing days have taken on epic and stressful proportions. Many children feel the pressure to do well so that their schools do well. This is the opposite of how it was meant to be. Any pressure was supposed to be exerted on education departments and the schools themselves to demonstrate that their students were being taught the appropriate approaches to reading, writing and arithmetic.

Somehow, things got skewed along the way. Now some students feel the stress of the tests so acutely they vomit on the day.

And a recent Murdoch University study into the effects of NAPLAN found teachers overwhelmingly felt pressure to ''teach to the test'' and believed the focus on NAPLAN was so strong that it detracted from the overall classroom experience.

To its credit, the Australian Education Union - which has vehemently fought the introduction of NAPLAN and My School - warned this would be the outcome.

And no doubt teachers across the ACT will feel their blood pressure rise as they gaze over The Canberra Times league tables. The blunt ranking of schools based on test results is another thing they warned would happen - and one they have fought to prevent.

The thing is, there's a strong public appetite to know how schools compare with each other, just as there's an appetite to know the details of the latest leadership ructions in the Labor Party and which Raiders player just got chucked off the team.

At the end of the day, is a parent going to whip their child out of a school that finds itself at the bottom end of the league table and enrol them in one at the top?

Unlikely. But even if they do that's their choice.

If any parent or any teacher has an issue with where their school is placed on the league tables today, they should take it up with the ACT Education Minister Joy Burch or the federal Schools Minister Peter Garrett.

These politicians hold the ultimate responsibility for educational outcomes across this city.

This week Garrett took great pride in rolling out a new analysis of the results of nearly $2 billion in national partnership spending to target schools with struggling and underprivileged students which showed widespread improvements in their NAPLAN scores, compared with the rest of the nation's students.

Intervention plainly works. And if anyone is to feel concerned about the placement of schools at or below the national average it is education ministers.

Happily, most parents understand NAPLAN results do not define a school.

But they have a right to expect that their child will pass through the education system with a strong grounding in the basics of reading, writing and maths.

The best way to achieve this is through direct consultation with teachers and principals and a close partnership with their school.

The tricky bit seems to be keeping the NAPLAN tests and results in perspective - an issue which may require more inquiry and attention from government.

Parents can at least start the process by taking their children to bookshops to buy them literature that is exciting and inspirational. Those slick and glossy guides to maximising NAPLAN scores, meanwhile, should be left in the bargain bin.