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Since its inception in 2008, NAPLAN has been a useful tool to help educators measure gaps in their students’ numeracy and literacy knowledge. But as technologies have advanced and students have become less engaged in pen-and-paper testing, Australia’s education ministers resolved to bring NAPLAN online.

What followed was a highly successful partnership between Education Services Australia (ESA) who were chosen to procure, supervise and operationalise the transition; Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) who are responsible for developing, delivering, and reporting on the assessment program; and Janison, the digital assessment platform delivery partner.

In transforming NAPLAN into a modern and engaging online test, the team was able to address previous limitations of the manual pen-and-paper tests. These included critical drivers such as equity of access, performance, security, scalability and futureproofing.

The transition to NAPLAN Online has evolved Australia’s national assessment program into a user-centred platform that offers:

• adaptive questioning with students moving through harder or easier questions, depending on their progress
• a ‘low or no bandwidth’ test player that runs even when internet connectivity is lost
• compatibility with a wide range of device types and operating systems
• regular and automatic offline saving of student work
• stronger than ever security
• environmental sustainability and a lighter carbon footprint.

This work has culminated into the largest NAPLAN Online testing period yet, with the platform delivering 4.3 million tests to 1.2 million school students in 2022, with more than 315,000 students simultaneously sitting the exam without issue at its peak.