Ardeer Primary School in Melbourne’s west recorded its strongest NAPLAN performance yet, lifting reading, writing and numeracy results across Years 3 and 5 and outperforming demographically similar schools.
Five years of explicit teaching helped drive the gains, the school said, with teachers breaking lessons into clear steps and modelling exactly what students must learn.
2026 NAPLAN results still showed large national gaps in foundational literacy and numeracy, prompting experts to urge parents to treat low scores as an early warning rather than a fixed verdict.
Professor Tanya Serry said weak literacy, if not addressed early, is linked to lower employment, underemployment and poorer physical and psychosocial health later in life.
Victoria rolled the explicit teaching model out to all public schools last year, part of broader national reforms that some educators say may take 2 to 5 years to fully show in results.