NAPLAN 2025: WA Education Minister Sabine Winton says teachers facing more students with complex needs
The results, released today, found about one in three children across Australia did not meet the proficiency benchmark, meaning they were unable to read, write or solve maths problems at the basic level for their age.
WA's Year 3 performance prompted concerns from education analysts, with 37.6 per cent failing to meet expectations for children their age in reading, and 38.5 per cent failing to meet the proficiency benchmark in numeracy.
WA Education Minister Sabine Winton said it was pleasing to see the results remained stable compared to last year, and highlighted improvements in the Year 5, 7 and 9 cohorts from their average scores two years ago.
'And that really is where the power of NAPLAN, from my perspective, lies in terms of assessing improvements made over time,' she said.
'In all of our year levels, that has occurred.'
On the Year 3 results, Ms Winton said schools were most focused on the students in the lowest band, who needed additional support.
In Year 3 reading, the percentage of students needing additional support increased from 11.3 to 13.9 in two years.
She said the WA Government was supporting early intervention through its Phonics Initiative, which includes a requirement introduced in 2023 for all public schools to undertake a Year 1 phonics assessment.
The Government has also selected 350 schools to take part in a new small group tuition initiative for students who need extra support.
'We know that if we support and invest in the early years of education, it will have lifelong benefits, and that's why we will continue to drive change that will support that,' she said.
'Whether it's through trialling full time free kindy, providing more supports to schools, and I know personally as a teacher and anecdotally talking to many, many teachers in schools, we are seeing more children in the young years presenting to school with development delays, more complex needs, and that's why our government is investing in early childhood education.'
This year marked the third NAPLAN (National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy) under a new reporting system which scores students across four bands; needs additional support, developing, strong and exceeding.
Students in the top two bands are considered to have met expectations for their age.
Children in the 'developing' band have not met expectations for their age group but are working towards it.
Ms Winton said WA's results were on par with the national average.
'I think it's a development that you're seeing right across Australia in terms of children with complex needs, with development delays, all sorts of things happening,' she said.
'We have had the COVID experience, and many kindy teachers tell me that that is also having an impact. So there's something happening at the national level, and I don't accept it's more exposed in Western Australia than anywhere else, but having said that, I accept that it is an area that governments need to continuously invest in.'
Ms Winton said there was also a role for parents to play in connecting with teachers and reading to children from an early age.
'We have the conversation about getting back to basics in school, but we also need to get back to basics with our children in our community.'
'It's around, actually, all of us acknowledging there are many, many things that go into that magic pot in a child that then results in them achieving great outcomes in literacy and numeracy testing.
'Schools and the work that teachers do each and every day in their classrooms is critically important, but there is so much more.'
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said the national results showed encourage signs but there was more work to do.
The Commonwealth has signed a $16 billion agreement with all states and territories to fix school funding, which is tied to reforms such as Year one phonics and numeracy checks.
WA is the only State that has not signed up to numeracy checks.
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