THE literacy and numeracy skills of students across much of the Hunter sit below the state's average, NAPLAN results reveal.
The recent data reveals Newcastle students are sitting well above state average in their spelling, reading, writing, numeracy and grammar, students in nearby electorates aren't fairing as well.
Charlestown and Wallsend were on par with the rest of NSW, while Swansea, Lake Macquarie, Port Stephens, Maitland, Cessnock and Upper Hunter were all below the state average.
Year 3 students across Newcastle scored a NAPLAN result 20 points above the state average in spelling, while neighbouring students in Port Stephens and Cessnock scored more than 30 points below average.
Year 5 Newcastle students excelled in reading while in Maitland, numbers were well below average.
For high school students in year 7 in Newcastle, numeracy was their best skill, scoring 15 points above the state average.
But digits weren't rising for the same year group in Lake Macquarie and Swansea, scoring 28 and 36 points below the state average.
Year 9 students in Cessnock scored poor reading results more than 30 points below the state average. The same year groups in Port Stephens and Cessnock trailed with similar numbers on their spelling results.
The NAPLAN results also revealed the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) of each electorate, which measures parent occupation, education, school location and proportion of Indigenous students enrolled.
The average ICSEA score for all Australian schools is 1000, with the most advantaged electorates having a higher score and least advantaged having a lower score closer to 500.
Newcastle sits above the national average with a score of 1077 and almost 40 per cent of students in the top socio-educational advantage bracket, and Charlestown and Wallsend have students evenly spread across the brackets.
But in Lake Macquarie, Swansea, Port Stephens, Maitland, Cessnock and the Upper Hunter, around 40 per cent of students are considered to be in the bottom or lower middle bracket.
University of Newcastle Laureate Professor of Education and Teachers and Teaching Research Centre director, Jenny Gore said people may assume there's a strong relationship between ICSEA and quality teaching, but in her research she found that wasn't the case.
"From about an ICSEA of 950 down, there is a slight relationship between quality of teaching and ICSEA, but above 950 there's no difference in the quality of teaching that is delivered," Professor Gore said.
"What we argue is rather than assuming that poor schools have poorer teachers, is that the conditions in some low SES schools are really hard to deliver quality teaching in, so I guess I really shy away from blaming teachers for these results.
"In almost all of those rankings, Newcastle doesn't have a school above it on the table with a lower ICSEA. In year 3 there was one school with a slightly lower ICSEA - 1017 (Wollongong) and as opposed to our 1077."
The Charlestown electorate scored an ICSEA of 1043 and Charlestown South Public School principal Tim Sparke said the positive results were due to high-quality teachers implementing the explicit teaching method.
"Explicit instruction is the pedagogy that's been here for a decade," he said.
"This school is a beacon of high quality teaching and if this is happening across Australia, public education is in good hands."
But Professor Gore says there's "a real danger" in some of the talk and recent push of explicit instruction.
"I think it's been taken up in quite a narrow way, that is not necessarily going to be helpful," she said.
"Particularly when people take it to the extreme with scripted lessons and to me, that's not what most people went into teaching for. Teaching is incredibly complex work, and I think we need to acknowledge that and I think we need to respect teachers as professionals.
"It's a complex field we're playing in."
The NAPLAN data scopes 2023 educational performance for years 3, 5, 7 and 9 across five subjects each year, and from 2025 most schools will use NAPLAN as part of their improvement growth measures.
