What Does "Developing" Mean in NAPLAN? A Calm Guide for Parents

The envelope comes home from school, you unfold the NAPLAN report at the kitchen bench, and there it is beside Reading or Numeracy: Developing. Your stomach drops a little. Is your child behind? Should you be doing something? Here is what that word actually means, what it does not mean, and what a calm parent can usefully do next.

The four levels, in plain English

Since 2023, NAPLAN results have been reported against four proficiency levels rather than the old numbered bands. For each area tested, your child's result lands in one of these:

• Exceeding — well above what is expected for their year level.
• Strong — meeting expectations that are deliberately set as challenging but reasonable.
• Developing — still building towards those expectations.
• Needs additional support — not yet meeting them, and likely to benefit from extra help.

The important design detail sits in the second level. When the new system was introduced, the bar for Strong was set high on purpose. It marks a challenging standard, not a bare pass. That means Developing does not mean failing. It means your child is on the way to a standard that was made demanding by design, and they are far from alone there — in every classroom in the country, plenty of capable children receive this word on their report.

What "Developing" does — and does not — tell you

A NAPLAN result is a snapshot of one morning. It tells you how your child handled one set of questions, in one format, on one day in March. That is genuinely useful information, and it is also a narrow slice of a whole child.

Here is what the word on the page cannot see:

• Growth. The levels are wide. A child can improve a great deal and still receive the same word two years running. "Developing in Year 3, Developing in Year 5" can hide real progress that happened in between.
• The near miss. The report shows a level, not how close your child sat to the next one. Some children labelled Developing were a handful of questions away from Strong.
• Test-day wobbles. A rough night's sleep, nerves, or an unfamiliar question style can pull a result below what your child shows in class every week.
• Effort and attitude. The things that best predict how the next few years go — persistence, curiosity, willingness to have another try — are not measured at all.

This is why teachers read NAPLAN alongside everything else they know about a child, and why the official guidance says the same to parents: treat it as one source of information among several, never a verdict. The official guide to interpreting NAPLAN results is short and worth five minutes.

What to do in the next fortnight

Not a project. Just a handful of small moves, most of them conversations:

1. Put the report next to the school report. If the classroom picture and the NAPLAN picture disagree, believe neither on its own — that disagreement is exactly what to ask the teacher about.
2. Book ten minutes with the teacher. Ask three things: Does this result match what you see in class? Which specific skill should we work on first? What would you do at home if this were your child?
3. Look past the word to the detail. The report breaks results into areas — reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, numeracy. "Developing" in one area with "Strong" elsewhere is a different story from the same word across the board.
4. Pick one thing. Choose the single area the teacher named and let the rest be for now. A term of steady attention on one skill beats a scattergun approach across five.
5. Go little and often. Ten to fifteen minutes a few times a week — reading together, times tables in the car, one short practice exercise — moves a primary schooler further than a long weekend session that ends in tears.
6. Keep your face calm. Children read our reactions. If the report is treated as interesting information rather than bad news, your child learns that results are something you work with, not something to fear.

That last point matters more than it looks. We have written before about why praising effort rather than the score changes how children handle every test that follows this one.

If your child is in Year 5, one extra thought

Year 5 results arrive at the moment many NSW families start weighing up the years ahead — applications for the Selective High School Placement Test usually open around October–November, with the test held the following May. If that path is on your mind, hold two ideas at once.

First, a Developing result does not close any doors. NAPLAN and the Selective test measure different things in different ways, and a year is a long time in a ten-year-old's development.

Second, unfamiliarity is fixable. Part of what NAPLAN measures, quietly, is how comfortable a child is with formal tests: reading a question under time pressure, moving on from a hard one, filling an answer sheet. That comfort grows with calm, exam-style practice long before any test that counts. Our NAPLAN Year 5 practice is built for exactly this — short, realistic sessions designed to reflect the style of the tests, so the format becomes familiar and the nerves have less to grab.

For a closer look at what the tests actually assess, see our guide to the literacy and numeracy skills behind NAPLAN.

The word is a signpost, not a sentence

"Developing" answers one narrow question: how did this child go, on that morning, against a deliberately high bar. It says nothing about ceilings, and nothing about where your child will be in two years. Read the detail, talk to the teacher, pick one thing, and keep it light at home. That is the whole job — and it is enough.