NSW has decoupled the year 9 NAPLAN test from the minimum standard of numeracy and literacy for high school graduation.

February 22, 2018

NSW year 9 students will no longer have to worry about their NAPLAN marks affecting their high school graduation.

The NSW government has separated the controversial test from the minimum standard of numeracy and literacy for high school graduation.

Education Minister Rob Stokes said teachers, parents and students had told him having the NAPLAN test linked to high school graduation was putting too much pressure on year 9 students and over-complicating the HSC. 

“There was very, very clear advice that it was confusing and it was complex,” Mr Stokes told 2GB radio on Thursday.

“NAPLAN should be a simple check-up, not a major operation.”

Mr Stokes said by allowing students to use their year 9 NAPLAN score to pre-qualify for the HSC minimum standard for literacy and numeracy, the test had inadvertently been transformed into a “high-stakes test”.

The decision to decouple it from the HSC comes less than two years after the former education minister, Adrian Piccoli, announced they would be linked.

In 2016, the state government introduced the changes allowing students with a band 8 NAPLAN to “pre-qualify” for the HSC.

Under the new system, to be introduced in 2020, students sitting the HSC will still be required to demonstrate a minimum level of literacy and numeracy.

This will be tested through short online reading, writing and numeracy tests in years 10, 11 or 12.

Opposition education spokesman Jihad Dib welcomed the “backflip” but said students should never have been put through “awful and horrendous stress” in the first place.

“We’re all for academic standards … (but) what we ended up seeing was NAPLAN not being used for what it’s designed for, it’s designed as a diagnostic tool and instead it became an issue,” Mr Dib told reporters.

NSW Secondary Principals Council president Chris Presland says the change is a “win for common sense”.

“We’re certainly not opposed to the concept of a minimum standard for the HSC, we don’t have any issue with that … but relating that to a year 9 literacy and numeracy test is educationally nonsense,” Mr Presland told AAP.

Mr Presland said NAPLAN had become “insanely out of proportion from what it should be” and having students sit the new online tests closer to their actual HSC made more sense.