What NAPLAN Won’t Tell You — But Brightpath Will
As Australia’s national testing programme for year 3,5,7 and 9 students, NAPLAN was designed to enable school systems and governments to measure and compare student performance across the country. It is used by the Federal government to compare the results of states and territories each calendar year and to monitor results over time. More controversially, NAPLAN results are also used to compare each school against other schools on the MySchool website.
While comparing student achievement at a system or school level has a legitimate role in monitoring and planning, educators’ day-to-day work is first and foremost about improving student learning. Brightpath was designed to address this need by providing teachers with full visibility of their students’ results as well as immediate, actionable feedback. Developed by assessment and measurement experts affiliated with the University of Western Australia, Brightpath brings NAPLAN-level reliability into everyday classroom assessment.
Brightpath still equips schools to measure and compare student performance. One of Brightpath’s founders worked extensively on NAPLAN and designed it so that schools receive comparative information that serves both leadership needs and classroom needs. The platform presents school, class, and student level data on achievement and progress in a way that teachers can act on immediately.
The purpose of NAPLAN — a system-level test
NAPLAN was first introduced in 2008 and supplanted state testing programmes. It is, first and foremost, a system-level testing programme that focuses on literacy and numeracy. The primary product of NAPLAN is system-level reports focusing on states, territories and subgroups of students, such as Indigenous students. From a school perspective, this means that NAPLAN allows schools to compare their students’ achievement against state and national results.
NAPLAN tests are professionally designed to meet high educational measurement standards, so their reliability and validity is high. However, there are important limitations for school and classroom use:
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It is a single test on a single day, which students attempt every two years, and individual scores inherently come with uncertainty attached to them—student scores could be 3 or more score points different on a different day.
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Results arrive months after the test is taken — far too late for teachers to use them to improve student performance.
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Because of the use of a branching testlet design in reading and mathematics, teachers cannot see students’ responses to individual questions.
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NAPLAN results reflect student performance, not school performance, because reports cannot separate the impact of teaching from students’ backgrounds and other influences.
Comparisons with ‘like schools’ on the MySchool website attempt to address the last limitation by providing a basic value-added indicator, but it should not be used without carefully taking into account contextual information about the so-called like schools. Value-added measures are contentious because the purported school or teacher effect is confounded by factors beyond the school’s control—such as the school’s resource base, staff turnover, administrative constraints, and details of its student cohort not captured by ICSEA.
Notwithstanding these limitations, schools can track their own students’ performance over time. School leaders can use this information when focusing on school improvement, by gauging whether programmes and initiatives appear to have an impact. NAPLAN also offers a useful external reference point by enabling schools to compare their results with National or state results each year and over time.
*Figure 1: The My School website showing a comparison to students with a similar background *
Section 2: The purpose of Brightpath — also a formative classroom feedback tool
Brightpath was designed in part to address limitations of NAPLAN. It brings the same professional rigour to assessment that NAPLAN does but places the assessments and reports entirely in teachers’ hands. It also supplies educators with on-demand teaching points.
Teachers can assess writing or mathematics tasks and receive immediate results. Crucially, they obtain specific teaching points and focus questions that tell them what to teach next.
*Figure 2: Brightpath’s Report to Parents, showing a student’s ability relative to that of others, both in the school and across all schools. *
In writing, Brightpath provides detailed teaching points linked to annotated student samples. The teaching points are statements that describe what students are ready to achieve next, and these statements are also linked to curriculum content. Teachers can view exemplars at the level each student is aiming for, giving a concrete model of a performance within the student’s zone of proximal development.
In mathematics, Brightpath identifies focus questions—the questions that target the specific skills and knowledge a student is most ready to master next. These are also linked to relevant curriculum statements. Using the focus questions, teachers can determine the next skills and concepts for their students to focus on and use the focus questions for immediate practice.
Brightpath therefore provides educators with specific, actionable insights as well as measurements of performance and comparisons of student performance. It tells teachers where their students are, with percentiles referenced to all Brightpath schools, as well as which skills and concepts each student most needs to focus on next. It also offers reports that show where students sit relative to detailed learning progressions in both Mathematics and English.
As mentioned earlier, Brightpath also enables comparisons of schools with other schools. School leaders and teachers can see whole-school data, including graphs showing the performance of different year levels in a single view. They can view pre- and post-testing results and effect sizes, and they can track student progress over time for individual students.
Because Brightpath uses common scales for all students, results are inherently moderated, ensuring that assessment results are directly comparable across classrooms and schools.
*Figure 3: The Brightpath Year Level Comparison report, showing the distribution of student narrative-writing ability for each year level, relative to one-another. *
Section 3: At a glance — key differences between NAPLAN and Brightpath
Section 4: How Schools Can Use Brightpath Alongside NAPLAN
NAPLAN provides schools with a useful national reference — a broad snapshot of student achievement that allows comparisons across states, systems, and demographic groups.
But it is only one point in time. Its results arrive months after testing and cannot show how learning unfolds from term to term.
Brightpath completes that picture by giving teachers and school leaders continuous, curriculum-linked feedback throughout the year, built on the same measurement principles that underpin NAPLAN.
Throughout the year, teachers can:
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Measure progress at intervals they choose, rather than waiting two years between tests.
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See where their students sit relative to detailed learning progressions in mathematics and writing.
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Identify each student’s zone of proximal development and select targeted teaching points or focus questions.
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Conduct pre- and post-testing within a unit or term and view effect sizes to evaluate program impact.
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Translate Brightpath growth results into NAPLAN-equivalent scores for staff who prefer to interpret progress on that familiar scale.
For school leaders, Brightpath’s moderated scales make it possible to view class-by-class or cohort-by-cohort growth, link these insights to curriculum initiatives, and decide where professional learning or support should be targeted.
In short, NAPLAN provides the national snapshot; Brightpath helps educators navigate the journey.
Conclusion:
NAPLAN tells you how your students performed in comparison with others. Brightpath also helps you improve their performance.
It’s time to move from testing to teaching. By combining NAPLAN’s reliability with formative feedback, Brightpath empowers teachers to make data immediately useful for learning.
If you’d like to see how Brightpath can enhance your school’s assessment approach, explore a demo of Brightpath Writing today — and discover how formative assessment, done well, bridges the gap between measuring progress and achieving it.