Students in major cities, including many Hunter Region centres, continue to outperform remote schools in this year's NAPLAN results.
Released on August 5, the national test by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) received results from more than 1.2 million students from 9400 campuses.
Ranking students across four proficiency levels - needs additional support, developing, strong and exceeding - results were compared across different categories, including gender and remoteness area.
Urban centres in the Hunter, including Newcastle, most of Lake Macquarie, Maitland and Cessnock, are classified as major cities under the 2021 census, while most of Port Stephens, Singleton and Muswellbrook are inner regional areas.
A higher proportion of students from major city schools were rated as strong or exceeding in this year's results compared with very remote schools.
NAPLAN tests reading, writing, conventions of language including spelling, grammar and punctuation and numeracy.
In both reading and numeracy, about 70 per cent of students from major city schools were considered exceeding or strong, while only 23 per cent received this rating in very remote schools.
ACARA CEO Stephen Gniel said it was disheartening that disparities had persisted over the years in students from regional and remote areas, as well as Indigenous students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
"This needs to be a continuing focus for all in the coming years," he said.
Overall national results, however, showed a promising upward trend in numeracy results for year 5, 7 and 9 students, with the highest results since 2023 when new proficiency levels were introduced.
This year, there were about 29,000 more students in the 'exceeding' category compared with 2023, and about 1600 fewer students rated as 'needs additional support'.
There was also an increase from 2023 to 2026 in the percentage of Indigenous students shown to be exceeding in numeracy in year 7 and 9.
Average numeracy results were less strong for year 3 students, which were the lowest since 2023 with 11 per cent rating as needing additional support.
"The drop in year 3 numeracy results is clearly concerning," Mr Gniel said.
He said education ministers were addressing the issue through a range of measures, including the rollout of the national year 1 numeracy check.
"ACARA is also playing its part by reviewing the Foundation to year 2 mathematics curriculum," he said.
While overall levels across all categories were mostly stable, average reading scores in year 5, 7 and 9 were lower than in 2025 and there was a slight increase since 2023 in students needing additional support in both reading and writing.
The proportion of students who were found to need additional support in reading was 10.2 per cent this year compared with 9.3 per cent in 2025.
Despite technical issues on the first day of testing that led to the writing test malfunction, national average writing scores were similar to last year.
Results are also compared based on gender, Indigenous status, and socio-educational background.
About one in three Indigenous students were shown to need additional support for reading and numeracy, compared with fewer than one in 10 non-Indigenous students.
Female students outperformed male students in writing, achieving average scores above male students in every year group, while male students outperformed female students in numeracy.
Mr Gniel said NAPLAN was not a pass or fail test, and shouldn't be used as a proxy for school entrance exams.
"It's a point-in-time test that helps us understand students strengths and areas for development, and is one aspect of a school's assessment program," he said.
