Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably noticed that NAPLAN results dropped a couple of weeks back.
And right on cue, as they do every single year, our politicians rushed to the microphones.
There’s something almost endearingly ‘fairytale’ about it, if you’re in a generous mood. A dataset of extraordinary complexity – covering dozens of year levels, domains, states, demographic cohorts and trend lines stretching back years – and within hours, every political spokesperson in the country has found the exact same thing: their policy is working spectacularly.
Remarkable, really. The data is always a perfect and complimentary reflection. “Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who’s the fairest of them all?”
I want to be careful here, because I’m not just poking fun at politicians. I’m poking fun at all of us . Because what politicians do publicly with NAPLAN data, school leaders often copy with their own school data every single week – and so do I.
It’s called confirmation bias. And it is one of the most well-documented, most human, most forgivable – and most dangerous – patterns in decision-making.
Here’s how it works in a school.
You’ve committed to a direction. Maybe it was even restorative practice. Maybe it was a new wellbeing approach. Maybe it was a significant shift in how your teachers instruct. You’ve invested time, credibility and professional capital in it. And so, without any conscious intention, your brain starts doing something clever and unhelpful at the same time.
It finds the evidence that you were right.
You see it in the student who took some unexpected ground and in the ambitious career teacher who said it was “Awesome”. It could even be a parent who wrote an unsolicited thank you email. These stories are real – and they really do matter. But they are not the whole picture.
Meanwhile, the three teachers who are quietly struggling with the new approach don’t make the cut for the narrative we’re creating. The cohort whose data slid a little gets attributed to other factors.
Sound familiar? For mine, it should. Because we’ve all done it.
In Restoring Teaching, I write that a genuinely restorative school has put “empathy above self-regard and simple responsibility above the need to lie or obfuscate the truth.” That line is usually applied to students and the cultures we build for them. But it applies to leaders too.
A school leader who can only hear good news is not a safe person for their staff to be honest with. And if staff can’t be honest with their leader, the school’s ability to course-correct is gone. I mean that – it’s not merely weakened. It’s gone.
The antidote isn’t self-flagellation or endless second-guessing (something I can also lapse into). It’s something far more practical.
It’s building a school culture where the honest conversation is the normal one. Where a teacher can say, “I’m not sure this is working for my kids,” without bracing for a defensive response. Where you, as a leader, actively go looking for the students who aren’t thriving under your current approach – not just the ones who are.
It means reading the full NAPLAN report. Not just the column that’s green.
Our students deserve leaders who are genuinely curious about what the data says – all of it. Not just the bit that confirms the decision was right.
The politicians will likely keep doing what politicians do with data, screeching the tyres to race to a single photo op at a single school that fits their own narrative, so we don’t notice concerning national trends. Sadly, that’s unlikely to change.
But you can.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. You might have heard about our Student Behaviour PhD. If you’re prepared to be curious about what is – and isn’t – working when it comes to student behaviour, it might be something to consider. It’s practical, online and self-paced, and it’ll give you a clearer roadmap for dealing with challenging behaviour without adding another enormous thing to your workload.
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