Ten years of print media coverage of NAPLAN

The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has been a key tenet of Australian education policy since its launch over a decade ago. Print media coverage of NAPLAN and myschool.edu.au,1 which displays and compares NAPLAN results across Australia, has played a role in both reporting and shaping this aspect of education policy. This paper uses a corpus-assisted approach to map print media representations of NAPLAN over the first decade of the Program, from 2008 to 2018. Building on previous work on NAPLAN and the print media (Mockler, 2013, 2016), it draws on a corpus of almost 6,000 articles from the Australian national and capital city daily newspapers published between 2008 and 2018. It charts the discursive shifts that have taken place over this period as NAPLAN has transitioned in the public space from a diagnostic tool seen to be useful to educators, to a comparative tool seen to be useful to parents and the general public, and more recently to a contested tool seen to have narrow or limited utility.