2025 NAPLAN national results · Edition 1
NAPLAN 2025 — what private school parents need to know.
Year 9 Reading national mean: 567.7. Year 9 Numeracy: 572.6. The data parents care about, sourced directly from ACARA's published 2025 dataset.
Key takeaways
- 2025 Year 9 Reading national mean: 567.7 (65.1% Strong or above).
- Parental-education premium: kids of bachelor-degree parents score 600 on Year 9 Reading vs 502.5 for Year 11-educated parents — a 98-point gap. This is the strongest NAPLAN signal correlated with private-school enrolment.
- 2024 → 2025 Year 9 Reading change: +2.7 points nationally. NAPLAN scores have largely stabilised post-COVID.
- For per-school NAPLAN data, look up the school directly on MySchool — we link to each school's MySchool profile from its provider page.
2025 national
National mean scores by year level + domain
National mean for all Australian students in 2025 across Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Use as the benchmark when reading a specific school's MySchool page.
| Year level | Reading | Writing | Numeracy | Spelling | Grammar and Punctuation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year 3 | 402.2 | 413.9 | 405.3 | 405.1 | 408.4 |
| Year 5 | 491.8 | 479.6 | 491.8 | 487.4 | 497.2 |
| Year 7 | 538.4 | 538.3 | 544.9 | 541.6 | 538.9 |
| Year 9 | 567.7 | 575 | 572.6 | 569 | 559 |
Mean scores on a continuous scale (typical range 250–700). Higher = better.
State breakdown
Year 9 mean scores by state
Australian Capital Territory typically leads NAPLAN means by 30–50 points (largely a function of demographics, not curriculum quality). Compare your state's mean to the school you're considering.
| State / territory | Y9 Reading mean | Y9 Numeracy mean | % Y9 Reading Strong+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australian Capital Territory | 579.4 | 577.1 | 70.7% |
| New South Wales | 571.4 | 581 | 66.3% |
| Victoria | 576.5 | 581.6 | 69.1% |
| Western Australia | 576.1 | 580.8 | 70.6% |
| Queensland | 555 | 556.3 | 59.1% |
| South Australia | 556.4 | 557.7 | 59.3% |
| Tasmania | 553.5 | 549.5 | 58% |
| Northern Territory | 498.7 | 491 | 38.6% |
The private-school premium
Why private-school students score higher (and what that actually means)
ACARA's data confirms what every educator knows: parental education is the strongest demographic predictor of NAPLAN performance. Most independent-school parents hold a bachelor's degree or above. Here's the gap, on Year 9 Reading.
| Highest parental education | Y9 Reading mean | % Y9 Reading Strong+ |
|---|---|---|
| Bachelor's degree or above | 600 | 81.5% |
| Diploma | 555.6 | 60.4% |
| Certificate | 537.1 | 49.7% |
| Year 12 or below | 538.1 | 49.4% |
| Year 11 or below | 502.5 | 31.2% |
What this means for school choice: a high private-school NAPLAN mean is partly the school doing good work, partly the cohort the school selects. The right metric for "is this school adding value?" is Year 5 → Year 9 gain relative to ICSEA-matched peers, not raw score. MySchool publishes both — look at "similar schools" comparisons, not the absolute number.
Per-school NAPLAN
How to read a school's MySchool NAPLAN page
MySchool (the ACARA-run national database) is the canonical source for per-school NAPLAN data. Every Australian school has a profile. Each provider page on this site links directly to its MySchool record. Here's what to look for:
- Year 5 → Year 9 student gain — the value-add measure. Schools with strong gain are genuinely lifting outcomes; schools with weak gain are coasting on cohort.
- Compared to "Similar schools" — MySchool auto-groups each school with ~60 ICSEA-matched peers. Compare scores against that group, not the national mean.
- % in Strong + Exceeding bands — a better signal than mean, especially for top private schools where the mean hits the test ceiling.
- Multi-year consistency — a single year of strong NAPLAN can be a fortunate cohort. Look for 3-year trends.
- Domain-by-domain — a school may be strong in Reading + Writing but weak in Numeracy, or vice versa. Match against your child's strengths.
A note on "best NAPLAN schools" rankings: most published rankings list selective government schools (MacRobertson, Melbourne High, Sydney Boys, James Ruse) at the top — they have selection criteria that pre-filter by cohort academic strength. Among non-selective independent schools, NAPLAN means converge tightly above ICSEA 1100; differences are within the margin of error.
Methodology
Where this data comes from
Source. Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), NAPLAN national results dataset.xlsx (2025 edition). Available at https://www.acara.edu.au/naplanresults as a 48 MB Excel download.
Coverage. All Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 NAPLAN-tested students nationally for the 2025 testing window (held in March). National + state + parental-education subgroups. Per-school data is published separately on MySchool.
Why no per-school NAPLAN here. ACARA holds per-school NAPLAN data behind MySchool's terms-of-use acceptance gate. Aggregating it across 215 schools requires bulk extraction we have not yet automated; we link to each school's MySchool record from its provider page instead. We aim to publish multi-year per-school NAPLAN trends in a future release.
Per-school NAPLAN trend pages — coming soon. The framework on this page is built to display per-school 5-year NAPLAN trajectories the moment we have verified per-school data. Subscribe to our newsletter (link below in footer) for release notes.