http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/national/13955443/gillard-defends-program-f...Prime Minister Julia Gillard has defended a national literacy and numeracy program, saying it was always intended to help individual students who were struggling rather than lift results in entire schools.
An audit of the $540 million literacy and numeracy national partnership used NAPLAN data from the targeted schools.
It found there was yet to be a statistically significant improvement in any state on average results, compared to other schools over the four years of the program.
"We know from national testing that too many children don't reach the minimum standard," Ms Gillard told journalists at a primary school in Sydney.
"This national partnership was targeted at those kids who are struggling."
She said the benchmark for the program's success was to boost results of those students who were struggling the most.
Ms Gillard pointed to results that showed that in the targeted schools 70 per cent of low-achieving students had improved results for Year 3 reading and 80 per cent had improved in Year 5 numeracy.
"That was always the aim of this program to help those kids who were falling behind their peers, falling behind our national standards, to get a lift up so that they were doing better," she said.
Schools Minister Peter Garrett said the audit analysis compared entire schools with each other while the programs targeted particular groups of students within those schools.
The Australian Education Union also defended the program, saying there were many different ways to measure its impact apart from looking at NAPLAN results.
The audit report said while it may still take several years before a reliable assessment of the national partnership could be made, schools and education authorities had reported some positive impacts.
The national partnership began in 2008 under Ms Gillard as education minister
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$540M Naplan failures (Read 243 times)
