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NAPLAN results and what they mean
Years 3, 5, 7 and 9
NAPLAN is the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy, sat by students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 across Australia. It is not a psychological assessment, but it is often the first formal signal a family gets that something needs looking at more closely, which is why we are asked about it so often.
This page explains what NAPLAN measures, what the proficiency levels actually mean, and when a result is worth acting on.
What do the NAPLAN proficiency levels mean?
Since 2023, NAPLAN has reported against four proficiency levels rather than the older ten-band scale.
- Exceeding. The student is performing above what is expected at that year level.
- Strong. The student is meeting the challenging but reasonable expectation for the year level.
- Developing. The student is working towards the expected level and may need some additional support.
- Needs additional support. The student is likely to need significant additional support to progress.
The levels are set against expectations for the year level, not against a percentile of other students. Two children in different years cannot be compared directly.
What can NAPLAN actually tell you?
It gives a broad indication of how a child is performing in reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy, relative to the expectation for their year. It is administered in a group, under time pressure, on a computer, on a particular morning.
That design makes it useful as a screen. A result in the developing or needs additional support range, particularly where it is inconsistent with how the child seems at home or with their classroom performance, is worth taking seriously.
It is not diagnostic and it was never intended to be. It cannot tell you why a child is struggling, whether the difficulty is specific to one skill, or whether the result reflects ability, anxiety, attention, a bad morning or an unfamiliar test format.
When should a NAPLAN result prompt an assessment?
The pattern worth acting on is a gap between what a child appears capable of and what they are producing. A child who is articulate and curious at home but sitting in the developing range for reading is describing a mismatch, and mismatches are what educational assessment is designed to explain.
- Results that are much lower than the child's classroom performance or apparent ability suggests.
- A marked difference between literacy and numeracy, or between reading and writing, rather than a flat profile.
- A result that has not improved across two NAPLAN cycles despite targeted support at school.
- A strong result achieved at visible cost, where the child is exhausted and working far harder than peers to keep pace.
- A result well above the expected level, where the question becomes whether the child is sufficiently extended.
How is an educational assessment different from NAPLAN?
NAPLAN is a group screen against year-level expectations. An educational assessment is an individual, standardised evaluation conducted one-to-one by a psychologist, usually pairing achievement testing with the WIAT-III against cognitive assessment with the WISC-V.
That pairing answers the question NAPLAN cannot, which is whether a child's academic skills sit where their reasoning ability would predict. Where they do not, and where the gap persists despite good teaching, that is the evidence base for a specific learning disorder and for the adjustments that follow from it.
Can NAPLAN results be used as evidence for adjustments?
On their own, rarely. Schools and examination authorities generally require individually administered, norm-referenced evidence to support adjustments and examination provisions, which NAPLAN is not.
NAPLAN results are useful as supporting context within an assessment report, because they document the difficulty across time and in an independent setting. We include them where families provide them.
Who provides educational assessment at Ivy Psychology
NAPLAN is administered by schools, not by us. Where a NAPLAN result raises a question worth investigating, educational assessment at Ivy Psychology is provided by Joel Moffat, Bozena Zawisz, Christopher Lim, Francesca Mannucci, Lisa Khuong, Chad Henney and Kerolos Saad.
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This page is general information about an assessment instrument and is not clinical advice. Whether a particular assessment is appropriate depends on the individual and the question being asked.