The latest national literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN) results show that government education policies have had little to no impact on student achievement in Australia since 2008. There has been virtually no change in overall average results, in the results of disadvantaged students and in the large gaps between the results of disadvantaged and advantaged students. 

Read more: NAPLAN Results: The Failure of Gvt to Address Education Disadvantage

Several teachers were found to have helped students with answers during last year‟s national literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN) tests. Several schools were also found to have encouraged some parents to withdraw their children from the tests. Test booklets went missing in some schools.

We are likely to see more and more of this in coming years. Cheating and rorting of school results will become a feature of Australia‟s education system just as it has in England and the United States with the publication of school results and school league tables.

Read more: Several Schools Found to be Cheating in NAPLAN Tests

US President Barack Obama says that students should take fewer standardised tests and school performance should be measured in other ways than just exam results.

“Too much testing makes education boring for kids”, he said.

"Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools," the president told students and parents at a town hall meeting in Washington, D.C.

Obama, who is pushing a rewrite of the nation's education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools, said policymakers should find a test that "everybody agrees makes sense" and administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few years instead of annually.

At the same time, Obama said, schools should be judged on criteria other than student test performance, including attendance rate.

Read more: Obama: "Students Should Take Fewer Standardised Tests"

While My School says very little about the effectiveness of any school, it does offer some tantalising information about Australia’s school system in general, writes Chris Bonnor.

MY SCHOOL is now two months old. Everyone will remember the excitement at its birth; according to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, or ACARA, millions of people were there at the time, or soon after. The media wrote about little else for a few days, and ponderous commentators called it a win for Julia Gillard and declared that, as an election issue, education was firmly in the bag for Labor. All the language of openness, transparency, choice and quality schooling was loaded up to fire at anyone who stood in the way.

My School is back in the news because of an Australian Education Union moratorium on this year’s NAPLAN tests, which currently provide the essence of what is commonly called school performance. Debate about the accuracy of the website has continued, focusing especially on the value of the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, or ICSEA, which is used to compare schools. To date, ACARA has not responded adequately to questions about the accuracy or fairness of My School. These questions won’t go away.

Read more: What My School really says about our schools

UK experience of national testing and school league tables a clear warning

For more than 20 years successive British governments have clung to the idea that testing at 7, 11 and 14 is set in stone, irrespective of the evidence that it undermines children’s learning. We are in the unacceptable position of England being the only country in the UK that carries out externally marked National Curriculum tests on our children at primary level.

Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland all manage to run an effective education system with teacher assessment being at the heart of evaluating pupil’s progress. England is the only country implementing such an unreliable and stressful system for assessing our children’s progress.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) are campaigning nationally against key stage 2 testing which takes place at age 11. Tests do not drive up standards they just cause additional stress for pupils, teachers and parents and are used to create league tables of schools.

Read more: UK experience a warning to Australia