The Coalition has called for a mobile phone ban in schools following disastrous NAPLAN results.
NAPLAN data has shown 13.5 per cent of Year 9 boys failed to reach the national minimum standard (NMS) for reading which, compared to the 92.9 per cent score for girls, has driven the entire cohort’s NMS down to 89.6 per cent.
The staggering results show a 3.2 percent decrease from when the national testing began in 2008 and a 2.2 percent drop from pre-COVID levels in 2019.
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Former education minister and Liberal frontbencher Dan Tehan said the scores reaffirmed the need for students to be adequately equipped with literacy skills before leaving primary school.
He added that it was now time to introduce a ban on mobile phones in classrooms.
“Mobile phones need to go from schools and there needs to be a back-to-basics approach,” Mr Tehan told Sky News Australia’s Peter Stefanovic.
“Phonics needs to be taught in every primary school right across this nation and the focus needs to be on getting kids to be able to read and write by the time they leave primary school.
“We encourage the states to introduce phonics and we will continue to do that from the opposition because that is absolutely vital to giving kids the skills they need to be able to read and write.”
The results show a similar gap emerging between boys and girls in writing and numeracy.
Female Year 9 students significantly outperformed their male counterparts in the writing tests with only 10.7 percent of girls failing to reach the NMS compared to 20.8 percent of boys.
In the numeracy test, the gap was much less with 4.3 percent of females and 5.6 percent of males coming in below the national standard.
In terms of the national results, Year 9 students on a whole improved in all three categories from last year’s data but went backwards in reading and numeracy from pre-COVID exams.
Mr Tehan said the results “clearly” showed state and territory responses to the global pandemic had affected education standards.
“The decision to close schools during the pandemic was the wrong one,” he said.
“I think all education ministers at the state and territory level now need to be really focused to make up for that decision which I think has really impacted on boys in particular.”
But Federal Education Minister Jason Clare was less concerned with the results, telling ABC News the findings were “better than I expected”.
This year’s NAPLAN tests were the first since the massive lockdowns in Melbourne and Sydney.
Mr Clare said there were some “pretty horrific predictions” as to the consequences of those measures but “that hasn’t transpired”.
“We’ve seen pretty stable results across most of the categories,” the Education Minister said.
“There are some examples, particularly in Year 9, where we’ve seen a tapering off. That’s of concern. I think part of that is COVID.”
He also addressed the “tapering off” in standards of boys compared to girls and said there had been a drop in the previous three years, but the results were “pretty stable” across the 14 years since the test began.
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