Getting NAPLAN online, one Queensland school at a time

Some of the schools I remember helping prepare for NAPLAN Online had around 10 to 20 students in the whole school and, from memory, an internet connection of about 10 Mbps.

That was the school’s connection. Everything else needing the internet had to share it too.

I took part in trial runs with small schools along the Flinders Highway in inland North Queensland while working as a Regional Systems Technician with Queensland’s Department of Education. When I started, specialist teams were already helping schools prepare. I remember that readiness work stretching over roughly two to three years.

It was quite something to see a national online assessment being made to work in those settings. Those schools are what I think about when the conversation turns to putting education online. Somebody has to make the policy work with the connection, equipment and people actually available.

Photo by Vitalii Abakumov on Unsplash.

The national transition was completed in 2022, following a live rollout that began in 2018. Years of preparation sat behind those dates. Wembley Primary School in Western Australia, for example, describes two years of trials and student preparation before participating in 2018 and 2019.

For the people supporting school technology, the change brought a very practical question: how many students could sit a test at the same time?

Schools could draw on shared computer rooms, sets of school-owned devices, one-to-one laptop or iPad programs, or bring-your-own-device arrangements. Each approach came with work attached. Having enough devices on an inventory did not necessarily mean having enough compatible, charged and available devices for a particular session.

I would be careful about attributing those device programs entirely to NAPLAN. Schools had broader reasons for investing in technology. Online testing did, however, give that planning a firm deadline and a specific demand to meet. Public, Catholic and independent schools all had to work out how their arrangements would support the students taking the tests.

The locked-down browser was one part of that preparation: the application students used to access the assessment in a controlled environment. Supporting it meant checking devices and the school network, as well as making sure staff and students were familiar with the process. The national test administration protocols describe the required applications and the arrangements for different delivery methods.

For smaller regional schools, the connection outside the school gate could be just as significant as the equipment inside it.

The low-bandwidth solution currently documented by Assessform gives a good sense of how this problem is handled. A test package is downloaded to the Remote application on a staff device. Students’ locked-down browsers receive their test content from that device over the school network. Responses return to Remote, then synchronise with the central assessment platform when an internet connection is available.

That reduces reliance on a continuous internet connection during the test. It still requires working devices, a working local network and careful preparation.

Queensland’s connectivity has changed considerably since then. The Department’s school bandwidth upgrade program describes a $187 million, five-year agreement with Telstra, alongside $109 million of Telstra investment in upgrades to more than 370 exchange service areas.

Upgrades commencing in 2022 raised the statewide average to 1.6 Mbps per student, which the Department describes as more than 60 times the previous standard. More than 90 schools have received fibre for the first time, with low earth orbit satellites also helping reach remote locations.

Those are substantial improvements. They are also part of a broader school connectivity program; it would be misleading to present all that investment as a NAPLAN expense. A statewide average cannot tell us exactly what a particular school had available during an earlier trial, either.

What it does show is how much the expectations placed on school connections have grown. Assessment has to share that capacity with teaching, administration and the rest of the school day.

What has stayed with me is the effort involved in giving those students a fair opportunity to complete the assessment. A small enrolment did not make the technical challenges disappear. It took preparation and people who understood the school.

That experience still shapes how I think about education technology. Before asking a school to depend on a new online service, I want to know what happens on its busiest morning, who can help when it fails, and how students will keep working if the connection drops.

Those questions will remain useful as NAPLAN changes again. The equipment matters, and so does the support that lets a teacher and a classroom of students get on with their day.

This is the second of two reflections on NAPLAN. The companion article covers NAPLAN’s timeline and the return of Year 5 writing to paper from 2028.