 What NAPLAN looks for is for young people's achievements in illiteracy and numeracy in particular looking at grammar and spelling and matches it up against national standards. So parents are really fortunate that they get a report from this and it shows them where their child is tracking against where we expect that they might be. It is a very valuable way of understanding how our children are going in comparison to other children and whether they need some help in a particular area or not. For the school it's also important in the fact that it gives the school a picture of where there may be some need for professional learning or additional resources to be placed. And for your own child if there are some challenges that are appearing in these results then as additional resources and support for you to give them at home can be articulated and the child can continue along their achievements. We use the data from NAPLAN in different ways depending on our children, depending on how old they are or how they've gone in the test so we use it in similar and different ways depending on the child. But what we do do is praise our kids irrespective of the results of NAPLAN for doing a good job that we tell them that we value them for who they are and not what they do. But NAPLAN for us has been a really important tool to start a conversation with our children particularly the older ones but more importantly with their classroom teacher. So we've used the data as a conversation starter if you like to work at well where are the kids in terms of their learning, how are they doing but perhaps more importantly where to from here. How can we work with our child and the classroom teacher to actually make sure our kids achieve what they're really capable of? Well we were able to have a talk with a conversation with our granddaughter about how she performed on the NAPLAN test to ask if she was comfortable that that really reflected how she feels she's sitting in the scheme of things and also once again it was an opportunity for us to have a talk to her teacher to see whether we were on the right markers to where we thought she was at the moment. When my daughter's report came home the first thing I looked at was how she was going across the different areas that were tested and I found that was really important because it showed me that she was doing better in some areas than others. Then I looked at the other information on the report to see how she was comparing with other students of her age both within her class and nationally. I also had a close look at the last page in the report that told me about the sorts of things she'd been tested on and the sorts of things she was expected to know and be able to do. This is part of an ongoing school program it's another learning opportunity actually for young people to engage with in this formal assessment along with all the other learning opportunities that they have at school and mums and dads sitting with their sons and daughters can make them much more rich rewarding positive experiences. NAPLAN is one in that list.