Once upon a time, there was a teacher named Miss Honey.

Miss Honey was a lovely teacher, who put a lot of time and effort into supporting her students in their learning. She recognised the importance of assessment and providing her students with quality feedback.

Miss Honey used a range of assessment strategies and activities to cater for her students’ learning styles and to ensure her students were provided with multiple opportunities to demonstrate their skills and understandings in all Key Learning Areas.

However, one day ‘the guys at the top’ introduced a new National Assessment Plan, which focused on standardised testing of Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).

The results from these annual tests were to be placed on a special My School website and this made Miss Honey, her students, and their parents very nervous!

Miss Honey knew that the tests would provide her with additional information on her students’ progression and that she could use the data gathered to help her to improve both her teaching and her students’ learning.

She also felt pressured to ensure that her students performed well on the tests, after all the results were going to be publicised! 

Therefore, Miss Honey decided that she needed to focus on literacy and numeracy and spend less time on other Key Learning Areas like Creative Arts, PDHPE, Science, Geography and History.

Miss Honey felt pressured to ‘teach-to-the-test’ and focus on 'NAPLAN-like' topics to ensure her students were able to succeed in the tests. 

Miss Honey’s students were eager to show the world their Literacy and Numeracy skills and were looking forward to using the information from the tests to guide them in their future learning.

However, since Miss Honey was focusing so much time on Literacy and Numeracy in class, the students began to identify these two Key Learning Areas as more important than other subjects.

Additionally, the students who performed better in areas other than Literacy and Numeracy felt disappointed that they would not be provided with the opportunity to share these skills with the public.