Minister praises NAPLAN results for NSW

NSW students are the country's best spellers, and in the top three for most testing categories, according to new national results.

NAPLAN (National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy) tests were released on Friday, with NSW Education Minister Verity Firth praising the performance of her state's students.

More than 300,000 NSW students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 sat the NAPLAN tests in May, which are used to benchmark students across all states and territories.

NSW ranked in the top three for average scores in most of the 2010 tests, and scored above the national average in all except Year 7 and 9 Writing.

The state again topped the nation in all years for spelling, while Year 5 students are NSW's best all-round performers.

"Our Year Five students have also done particularly well, there must be something in the water for Year Five this year," Ms Firth said.

"We have the highest percentage of kids in the top band for spelling, numeracy and grammar, and punctuation."

While NSW trailed the ACT on many measures, Ms Firth said it was hard to compare different jurisdictions.

"We always have, since the beginning of national testing, come top three," Ms Firth said.

"We have the largest amount of students in NSW, we've got the most diverse population of students in NSW ... and we still do really well in those top three."

NSW preferred to compare the 2010 results against the state's previous record, rather than on a state-by-state basis, Ms Firth said.

She said this year's scores were consistent with those in 2008 and 2009.

"We're most interested in how our kids are going, and how they're improving over time, and whether there are any statistically significant improvements or decreases on improvement that we need to work on," she said.

"Now we essentially take all this data and break it down. We look at how schools have performed, how classes have performed, how different cohorts of students performed, so we can now target ... the resources needed."

Parents will be given individual student reports, including information on how their child is faring against school and national averages.

Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell said NSW should be leading the nation when it came to numeracy and literacy.

"We are the biggest state, we should be leading the nation, we should be leading national averages," he said.

"There's no point boasting about having the most number of students at school if those students aren't getting the literacy and numeracy and other skills they need to make a start in life when they leave school."