Victorian education standards continue to stagnate under Daniel Andrews

LAST week’s NAPLAN results show that after nearly four years the Andrews Labor Government haven’t made any improvements on school students standards and outcomes.

Despite receiving billions of dollars extra in school funding from the Federal Government, Daniel Andrews is failing to convert that into better results. Instead, the literacy and numeracy standards of Victorian school children have barely improved under his four years as Premier.

The NAPLAN results must be a great concern for parents of school children.

The indisputable trend is that Year 9 is falling behind other states in key domains of reading, spelling, grammar & punctuation and numeracy.

In Year 3, Victorian students are ahead of all other states in Reading, but by Year 9, they’ve dropped to 3rd place, behind ACT & WA. Spelling weakens to 4th rank, as do the learning domains of Grammar & Punctuation and Numeracy.

Year 9 is an important year in the lead up to the end of a student’s secondary studies. These results show that our students are not as well prepared as other states as they approach their final years of school.

But despite Daniel Andrews and James Merlino’s chest thumping about today’s results, alarm bells are ringing at every level.

Stagnation is the recurring trend across all year levels and domains. Over the past decade, of 20 areas of measurement, 13 of them report stagnation.  Four areas, (Year 3 reading, Year 5 reading, spelling and numeracy) report slight increases, but this is countered by 3 areas of decline, namely writing in years 5, 7 and 9. This constant fall in writing results is particularly concerning.

In the past year alone, every domain has stagnated, with no improvement evident at any year level or any domain.

It is difficult to understand how as Education Minister, James Merlino has achieved so little with so much extra money.

One explanation is that James Merlino is too busy playing the political ‘Attack Chihuahua’ instead of focusing on his real job which is improving Victorian schools.

James Merlino has presided over yet another list of concerning NAPLAN results, proving once again that the so-called Education State slogan is not worth the number plates it’s written on.

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