NAPLAN results are too often treated as proof of teaching quality alone, while funding gaps, staffing shortages, disruption, disadvantage and student need are pushed out of view.

Every August the same liturgy is performed. The results are released, the commentary follows within hours, and somewhere in it a minister or an academic locates the cause of whatever the numbers show. This year that cause is explicit teaching. Numeracy has improved in Years 5, 7 and 9, and we are told this is what direct instruction, phonics and small-group tuition look like when they work. Year 3 numeracy has fallen, while reading results have also declined across the older year groups, and we are told the reforms have not yet had time to work. Give them another five years, the argument goes, and the same method credited with the gains will eventually repair the losses.

I have no quarrel with explicit teaching. Good teachers have always used its essential elements: state the purpose clearly, model the skill, guide the practice, check understanding and gradually hand responsibility to the student. What is being sold as reform is largely a return to practices good teachers never abandoned, dressed in new departmental language and presented as a discovery.

My concern is not with the method. It is with the certainty attached to it: the confidence with which governments treat pedagogy as the variable that explains the results while other influences are quietly retired from the conversation.

Consider what is being asked of the argument. If results improve, the explanation is teaching quality, newly strengthened by explicit instruction. If they do not improve, the explanation is still teaching quality: insufficient fidelity, insufficient time or an incomplete rollout. Heads, the policy gets the credit. Tails, the school gets the blame. The explanations denied a hearing are precisely those that might implicate the people doing the excluding.

Start with money. NSW public schools remain below the Schooling Resource Standard, the governments’ own estimate of the funding required to meet student need. Current agreements place them on a pathway to full funding only by 2034, while non-government schools are already at, moving towards, or being brought back to their entitlement. Governments have therefore conceded the essential point: public schools do not yet receive the resources their needs-based formula says they require.

When a school assessed as needing more than it receives fails to close the gap with a better-resourced school serving a less demanding enrolment, that is not evidence about teaching alone. It is also evidence about arithmetic.

Then consider what a classroom actually contains. A decade-long study following nearly 72,000 NSW public school students found that 19 per cent experienced at least one suspension or expulsion between Years 3 and 12. Children of unemployed parents were almost three times as likely as their peers to receive one suspension or expulsion and around 10 times as likely to accumulate 16 or more. Behavioural distress and exclusion are not scattered evenly through the system; they are concentrated alongside disadvantage.

This is not an argument against the students involved. It is an argument against pretending that their needs, and the system’s inadequate response to them, have no effect on the learning environment. A serious incident can consume instructional time, disrupt other classes, require reports and risk assessments, injure staff and leave students and teachers unsettled long after order has been restored. A teacher can deliver an explicitly structured lesson with great skill, but no method can ensure that every student is present, regulated, safe and ready to learn.

Nor is disruption confined to the classroom. National research released this year, drawing on 298 critical-incident testimonies from 256 public school principals, found almost two-thirds described incidents involving violence, threats, harassment or abuse. Separate longitudinal research found approximately half of principals had experienced physical violence and more than half had faced threats. The lead researcher described principals in disadvantaged communities as the canaries in the coalmine of decades of public-school underfunding.

These are not merely staff-wellbeing matters. A depleted or continually changing staff cannot provide the continuity of a stable school. OECD evidence shows that Australia has one of the largest disparities in staff shortages between advantaged and disadvantaged schools. Yet NSW does not publish teacher vacancies, turnover, absence or internal class coverage by school disadvantage. We know where results are low, but not how often those students were taught without their regular teacher.

What governments choose to measure is itself revealing. NAPLAN gives us precise achievement data for schools, but not the workforce and environmental data required to interpret it fairly.

NAPLAN does not simply measure how well a method has been taught. It records the accumulated effects of where a school sits within a system that has spent decades sorting much of its most complex and under-resourced work into the public sector.

As families with the means to choose move away from schools acquiring reputations for low results or difficult behaviour, disadvantage becomes more concentrated. The published results then reinforce the reputation that encouraged the movement. Researchers call this residualisation: a feedback loop in which need concentrates, social and political support weakens, and the schools inheriting the greatest difficulty are judged as though enrolments and learning conditions were evenly shared.

None of this appears in the ministerial release. Every gain is associated with government investment and reform; every shortfall becomes an area in which schools must maintain their ‘focus’. Focus is apparently treated as an inexhaustible resource, unaffected by vacancies, disrupted attendance, complex disability, violent incidents or funding below assessed need.

The asymmetry is not incidental. It is the load-bearing structure of the annual exercise. When results rise, ministers point upwards to policy. When they fall, responsibility travels downwards to schools and teachers.

I taught, and later led, in public schools for more than 40 years. Method matters, and teachers should be accountable for the quality of their teaching. But teaching becomes learning only when the surrounding conditions allow it. NAPLAN cannot isolate the influence of pedagogy from attendance, staffing, safety, student need, family circumstances or resources. To claim that it can is to give a limited test a validity it does not possess.

A more honest account would place beside the scores each school’s funding, attendance, staffing stability, serious incidents, concentration of disability and specialist support. Governments would then appear in the accountability story alongside teachers.

Until that happens, NAPLAN will continue to measure outcomes stripped of the conditions that produced them. Government will claim the gains, teaching will be assigned the failures, and the only cause anyone is allowed to name will remain the one that costs ministers nothing.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.