NAPLAN 2026 national results split by domain and postcode

Digital Attitudes, 5 August 2026

Wednesday of Term 3 Week 4, and the day the national assessment number the sector has been waiting for since March finally lands, in a form nobody quite predicted.

NAPLAN 2026 national results land with numeracy up, Year 3 down, and a 70 to 23 postcode gap

ACARA released the 2026 NAPLAN National Results today. Numeracy at Years 5, 7 and 9 is the highest since the proficiency scale was reset in 2023, with roughly 29,000 more students in Exceeding and around 1,600 fewer needing additional support than three years ago. Year 3 numeracy is the lowest since the 2023 reset. Reading at Years 5, 7 and 9 is below 2025, and the share of students needing additional reading support rose to 10.2 per cent, from 9.3 per cent last year. Writing sits alongside a caveat on the Individual Student Reports for Years 5, 7 and 9 that traces back to the 11 March Education Services Australia platform outage, and the geographic gap on reading and numeracy runs 70 per cent Strong or Exceeding in major cities against 23 per cent in very remote schools (Mirage News on the NAPLAN 2026 national results release, Newcastle Herald on numeracy up and literacy down nationwide).

Why this matters: For a state Department of Education data lead, the useful reads today are not the year on year headlines, they are the three signals the sector has to plan against for Semester 2. The Year 3 numeracy drop is the one that will be quoted at the next parent information night, and the national Year 1 numeracy check ACARA CEO Stephen Gniel named is the mitigation the state will be expected to have adopted by 2027. The reading decline at Years 5, 7 and 9 is the trend line that undoes the "post pandemic recovery" story departments have been running for two years, so a director of teaching and learning needs a paragraph in the Week 6 board pack that names what changes in the Term 4 reading intervention. The 70 to 23 city and remote gap is the one that a diocesan or regional director cannot leave to the state to write about, because the ATSI equity funding review the Commonwealth has flagged for late Semester 2 will read this dataset directly. The concrete Term 3 action for a principal is a one page comparison between the school's own Year 3, 5 and 9 results (already in parent hands) and the national medians published today, so the parent teacher interviews in Weeks 5 and 6 walk in with the same number the front page will be running tomorrow.

CSSA Trial HSC goes online with Gradeo across three subjects from Monday

The Catholic Schools NSW Trial HSC examinations opened on Monday 3 August and run to Monday 17 August, and this year the CSSA has delivered three subjects fully online through Gradeo, its assessment platform partner since November 2024. The three subjects are Enterprise Computing, Science Extension and Software Engineering, chosen because they mirror the same three NESA is running as online HSCs in Term 4. Gradeo lists more than 4,300 NSW students across those three subjects and reports 24,000 hours of activity and over 172,000 exam sessions on the platform in the four months to trial start (Gradeo on the first large scale synchronous trial exams in Australia, Catholic Schools NSW on the 2026 CSSA Trial HSC examinations).

Why this matters: For any NSW school running the CSSA Trial pack this fortnight, the operational fact is that Enterprise Computing, Science Extension and Software Engineering are the first HSC subjects to be sat under exam conditions on an Australian assessment platform at this scale, and the incident that shows up in your invigilation log today is the incident that will land on the NESA post mortem for the October HSC. The concrete Term 3 action for a head of computing or a head of science is a one page note back to the CSSA within the trial window on what actually happened in the room, which questions did not render, which browsers failed lockdown, which network drops caused resits, because the CSSA and Gradeo will hand that log to NESA and the vendor cycle for the October exams closes early September. For a director of digital learning at a Catholic system school, this is also the read on whether the same platform is a candidate for the internal Semester 2 assessment window, and whether the school's own device fleet and lockdown browser stack passed the trial without a call to the help desk.

OAIC guidance on automated decision making due September, and schools are inside the definition

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has confirmed the guidance on the new automated decision making transparency obligation, added to Australian Privacy Principle 1 by the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024, is expected in September 2026. From 10 December 2026, APP entities that use personal information in automated decisions with the potential to affect rights or interests must update their privacy policies to describe the kinds of personal information used, the nature of the decisions, and the circumstances under which the decisions are made. The Issues Paper the OAIC released on 18 May, with submissions closed on 15 June, signals a broad reading of "substantially automated" and puts education inside scope alongside banking, insurance and healthcare (OAIC consultation on guidance for transparency in automated decision making).

Why this matters: For a school business manager or a director of ICT, this is a second privacy clock running alongside the Children's Online Privacy Code deadline the sector is already tracking (also 10 December 2026), and it lands on a different surface. The ADM obligation names AI marking tools, automated attendance flagging, predictive at risk analytics, and any workflow where a computer program makes or substantially informs a decision affecting a student or a family. The concrete Term 3 action is a one page audit of every school workflow where a piece of software is producing an output that a staff member accepts without a manual review, because the December privacy policy update will need to name those workflows explicitly. For a diocesan or AISNSW ICT lead, the September guidance is the moment to publish the shared template, because 200 schools writing 200 different disclosures in November is the risk exposure the sector should not repeat from the Notifiable Data Breaches rollout.

Excel Academics ships LearnCEL as an Australian adaptive learning system for HSC, VCE, QCE, WACE and SACE

Excel Academics launched LearnCEL this month, an adaptive learning platform for senior school students across HSC, VCE, QCE, WACE and SACE, built out of a beta program with more than 500 students. The platform maps content against a concept mastery graph of more than 1,000 linked concepts, uses a predictive analytics engine to forecast where a student's gaps will surface next, and ships an AI study companion (ARO) alongside expert video lessons and adaptive practice sessions. Director Sreeya Das positions the platform as an end to end predictive and adaptive learning system for Australian senior students, and the beta case studies name a Year 12 Chemistry cohort where the platform identified an ICE table interpretation gap and moved equilibrium mastery from 54 per cent to 83 per cent inside two weeks (IT Brief Australia on the Excel Academics LearnCEL launch).

Why this matters: For a Head of Senior School or a Director of Teaching and Learning at a school with a Term 4 revision program, LearnCEL is the first Australian built senior school adaptive product that maps to five state and territory curricula at once, which is the point at which "buy an international product with Australian branding" starts to look weaker on procurement. The concrete Term 3 action is to compare LearnCEL's concept mastery graph against the school's own scope and sequence for at least one Year 12 subject, and to ask the current revision platform vendor whether it can name a specific mastery gain in Australian units of measure. For a diocesan or independent group Head of Curriculum, the question worth putting on the agenda is whether a small subject level pilot is the shortest path to a defensible Term 4 procurement decision, because the revision spend renews in November and "we ran a two week comparison" is a stronger paper than "the marketing deck looked good".

The week's headline is national and comes with a domain by domain and postcode by postcode split, and the three clocks running underneath it (CSSA online trials, OAIC guidance, and Term 4 revision procurement) are the ones the sector has to move on before Semester 2 closes. More at digitalattitudes.com.au.