PRINCIPAL of Charlestown South Public Colin Johnson has pointed to initiatives including forming a relationship with one of the country's highest performing schools, daily "warm up" activities and a morning reading program as contributing to his students' NAPLAN success.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) will update the My School website on Wednesday to reflect every school's performance in the tests last May.
ACARA chief executive David de Carvalho said the agency had overhauled the way it presented NAPLAN data online.
"These changes are being made to help parents and school authorities focus more on how a school is performing in terms of student progress ie improving literacy and numeracy outcomes over the two years since the previous NAPLAN tests, and less on 'school versus school' comparisons that only take account of overall levels of achievement," he said.
ACARA has ceased providing a high gains list, but the NSW Education Standards Authority has identified Charlestown South as a "high progress" school.
Principal Mr Johnson said the school had seen over the past three years a large increase in the percentage of students achieving results in the top two bands in the tests, which are held in reading, writing, language conventions and numeracy.
"We thought there must have been a mistake when the results went up," Mr Johnson said.
"We've all done a lot of hard work over the past few years putting in a new practice."
Mr Johnson said the school was identified in 2015 as one of 137 'Bump It Up' schools, with children achieving in the middle NAPLAN bands but with capacity to achieve in the top two bands.
He said the schools were given a goal of pushing another three per cent of students each year into these bands.
He said the school had started investigating explicit instruction in 2014 and eight teachers flew to Melbourne in 2015 to learn from expert John Fleming.
It appointed an explicit instruction expert lead teacher and introduced "warm ups", daily activities of up to 15 minutes in maths, literacy and writing that embed basic knowledge through recitation, recollection and application.
"All the time we used to have to spend reteaching - we don't have to do that anymore," he said. The school also introduced an "early bird reading program" twice a week and a home reading program.
He said results included 100 per cent of the school's 2019 year three cohort achieving in the top two bands for reading, compared to 40 per cent of the 2016 year three cohort.
He said 93 per cent of the 2019 year three cohort were in the top two bands for writing, compared to 43 per cent of the 2016 year three cohort.
He said 87 per cent of the 2019 year three cohort were in the top two bands for numeracy, compared to 42 per cent of the 2016 year three cohort.
He said the 2019 year five cohort had 51 per cent of students in the top two bands for reading, an improvement of 10 per cent from when they were in year three.
It had 52 per cent in the top two bands for numeracy, an increase of 21 per cent since year three.
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