{"id":66032,"date":"2026-08-06T01:53:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T01:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/66032\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T01:53:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T01:53:24","slug":"queensland-lags-behind-nation-on-naplan-testing-with-reading-results-dropping-across-all-year-cohorts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/66032\/","title":{"rendered":"Queensland lags behind nation on NAPLAN testing with reading results dropping across all year cohorts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Queensland students have continued to lag behind the national average in literacy and numeracy, according to the latest round of NAPLAN results.<\/p>\n

About 1.2 million students sat for NAPLAN testing in March, which assesses Australian year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students’ proficiencies across numeracy, reading, writing, spelling, and grammar and punctuation.<\/p>\n

Queensland Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek told ABC 612 there was “more to be done” and his government would be focused on getting “back to basics”.<\/p>\n

“Everything that we’re doing is about trying to make sure that our teachers can focus on the basics of literacy and numeracy,” he said.<\/p>\n

Mr Lanbgroek said additional teachers and teachers aides, a focus on behaviour and bullying and NAPLAN readiness programs are all part of an approach to increasing education standards.<\/p>\n

The NAPLAN standards<\/p>\n

Exceeding: Exceeds expectations at the time of testing.<\/p>\n

Strong: Meets challenging but reasonable expectations at the time of testing.<\/p>\n

Developing: Indicates the student is working towards expectations at the time of testing.<\/p>\n

Needs additional support: Indicates student is not achieving the learning outcomes expected at the time of testing and is likely to need help to progress.<\/p>\n

Consistently second-last<\/p>\n

Queensland consistently rated comparably or below the other states and territories, other than the Northern Territory, in terms of average score and students scoring at a strong proficiency level or higher.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Levels of achievement across all year levels and subjects broadly followed geographic location of students.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Students in major cities achieved higher average scores than those in regional Queensland, with scores decreasing further into remote areas.<\/p>\n

Compared with last year’s results, Queensland year 5 students have seen improvement in writing, spelling, and numeracy, and year 7 students have improved on numeracy.<\/p>\n

Year 3 and 9 students have achieved average results worse than last year’s on every subject.<\/p>\n

The proportion of year 3 students scoring at a strong proficiency level or better has dropped since last year in writing, spelling, numeracy, and grammar and punctuation, with the cohort only achieving comparable scores in reading.<\/p>\n

Are you smarter than your year 9 maths student?<\/a><\/p>\n

Test your quick maths skills with this NAPLAN-inspired test to see if you’re smarter than you were in Year 9.<\/p>\n

In comparison with last year’s results, Queensland year 9 students achieved similar scores in spelling and numeracy, and scored worse in writing, reading, and grammar and punctuation.<\/p>\n

Nationally, year 3 students scored within the margin of error of last year’s results in reading, spelling, and grammar and punctuation, with drops of about 3 per cent in students achieving a strong or above results in writing and a 2 per cent drop in the same metric for numeracy.<\/p>\n

\"Items<\/p>\n

Queensland recorded a drop in reading NAPLAN levels across all testing groups in 2026. (ABC News: Timothy Ailwood)<\/p>\n

Reading results below par<\/p>\n

Reading scores were of particular concern for Queensland, with each year group achieving average scores below the standard set last year.<\/p>\n

Percentage of students at “needs additional support” level for readingYear 3 \u2014 15.2 per cent (11.3 per cent nationally)Year 5 \u2014 9.4 per cent (7.7 per cent nationally)Year 7 \u2014 13.7 per cent (10.7 per cent nationally)Year 9 \u2014 15.1 per cent (11.1 per cent nationally)<\/p>\n

Across years 3, 7 and 9, only the Northern Territory had a larger proportion of students in the “needs additional support” category, with Western Australia also coming behind Queensland in the year 5 cohort.<\/p>\n

In terms of numeracy, Queensland’s average NAPLAN score for year 9 students was 555.8, above 2023’s score of 554 but slightly below last year’s score of 556.3 \u2014 within the margin of error.<\/p>\n

The same metric for year 3 students shows a more precipitous drop, with an average numeracy score of 387.6, down from last year’s score of 393.1.<\/p>\n

Numeracy scores for year 5 and 7 students fell within the margin of error of last year’s results.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

The average NAPLAN score for numeracy improved for Queensland students in years 5 and 7, with year 9 falling within the margin of error. (ABC News: Keane Bourke)<\/p>\n

Stephen Gniel, chief executive of Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) said it was important to “compare apples with apples”.<\/p>\n

“Queensland has a higher proportion of students with disadvantaged backgrounds than some of those other jurisdictions, I think it’s important to recognise that,” he said.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the Queensland Department of Education also noted the state’s participation rate of 92.2 per cent.<\/p>\n

“Years 5, 7 and 9 showed an overall increase in participation in comparison to 2025,” they said.<\/p>\n

“Queensland state schools achieved their highest year 7 participation rate since 2014 (92.4 per cent) and their highest year 9 rate since 2017 (85.7 per cent).”<\/p>\n

\"Man<\/p>\n

Queensland Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek welcomed the state’s highest participation rate in NAPLAN since before the COVID-19 pandemic. (ABC Gold Coast: Dominic Cansdale)<\/p>\n

Technology a concern<\/p>\n

Mr Langbroek said part of a return to basics could see less use of screens and devices in schools, similar to changes set to be trialled in Victorian primary schools from 2027.<\/a><\/p>\n

“We know [students] get lots of time on devices at home and away from school,” he said.<\/p>\n

“That’s why we’re saying we don’t need as much technology and some of the states are actually saying we’re not going to have people on devices at all.”<\/p>\n

Mr Gniel said it was about achieving a “balance”.<\/p>\n

“Let’s not lurch one way or the other, lets do this in a way that’s really considered and sets our kids up for the best lives that we can,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Literacy and numeracy are the foundational skills for all other areas, that remains the case, even though we’ve got technology that’s promising to do all of this for us.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Queensland students have continued to lag behind the national average in literacy and numeracy, according to the latest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[82223,22,21,2307,34588,21453,80606,212,1019,972,82224],"class_list":["post-66032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-acara","tag-au","tag-austrlia","tag-education","tag-literacy","tag-naplan","tag-numeracy","tag-queensland","tag-school","tag-schools","tag-spelling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}