The Thistle - An E-Newsletter of Scotch College, Perth, Western Australia

NAPLAN Results 2017 - communicating with your son

Parents of students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 recently received an email from the College regarding the release of the 2017 NAPLAN results. We encourage parents to have an open conversation with their sons regarding the results.

These results are a snapshot in time, they represent your son's academic ability in standardised assessments sat in May of 2017. To that affect, they do not take into account the learning that has occurred since, nor do they take into account your son's frame of mind at the time; the NAPLAN assessment should be used only as an academic check-up.

Similar in the way we will visit the GP to assess our health at a given moment in time, NAPLAN allows us as educators and you as a parent to have a view of your son, in a standardised assessment, at one point. It does provide us with some common ways to consider his growth over time in the areas of reading, writing, numeracy, grammar and spelling. As a school, we analyse the data and consider any changes we can make to improve the learning outcomes for all of our students.

Media outlets will be quick to draw comparisons across the states and sectors of education; we are concerned with the story of the individual. As a college, we are driven to know the boy; academic data is one way we do this.

We will also consider his ability to reflect, how open-minded he is, how balanced he is, how well he communicates, we do this by working with him in the classroom and observing his development through our co-curricular offerings.

We will also see his skill development through the International Baccalaureate Approaches to Learning and evaluate his progress in the ability to collaborate, to think critically and his organisational skills.

There are many indicators we can consider as a result of the NAPLAN assessments, yet there is a great deal more we can add by considering the whole picture of the individual that is your son.

Thank you for trusting us to educate your son.

Mr Peter Allen
Director of Teaching and Learning