In the ACT, achievement in NAPLAN is mostly determined by when your parents finished their education journey.
If the parents went to university and got a bachelor's degree or higher, their children probably did well.
If the parents have a diploma, the child will be on average 40 points lower.
Students of parents who got a certificate or finished year 12 will be about 60 points behind the top group.
Trailing about 100 points behind the students with university-educated parents are the children of parents who finished their education at year 11.
School education is meant to be the great equaliser in society. You can come from all different backgrounds but by the end of school everyone should have the basic keys to a successful life: literacy and numeracy skills.
The 2026 NAPLAN results show a similar story to previous years. The ACT rises to the top two spots across most domains compared to the rest of the states and territories.
But considering the ACT spends more on educating each student and our overall level of socio-educational advantage is high, this is to be expected.
There is a group being left behind that needs more help to catch up.
This is what the ACT government's Strong Foundations program is supposed to be addressing.
This was meant to be resetting the public education system so that every child gets access to the same, evidence-based teaching in literacy and numeracy.
Every child was to be taught the phonetic code in a systematic way so that they learn to read and then read to learn.
A key part of this is a multi-tiered system of support including small-group tuition and one-on-one instruction so that the children who need more support can catch up.
Research shows that if they do get the intervention they need using the programs that work (those based on systematic synthetic phonics), they can and do catch up.
An independent review into the Strong Foundations rollout found there needed to be a clear set of expectations for principals and teachers for how to run these small-group and one-on-one support programs within their current resourcing levels.
The ACT Education Directorate said it will take several years for the reforms to be reflected in system-level results. And that is probably correct.
The directorate should be applauded for deciding to publish the results from the Year 1 phonics check in its annual report.
This is a great step forward for accountability to know whether the reforms a really working.
Four public schools are currently in a pilot program to try out multi-tiered system of support.
But this year's NAPLAN results show that the work of ensuring every school has multi-tier system of support should happen urgently so that the students who are lagging behind are getting the support they need.
