NAPLAN Writing and the Seven Steps

What does NAPLAN value?

Good news! NAPLAN values and rewards great writing. The NAPLAN Marking Guides for narrative and persuasive writing reveal that eight of the 10 marking criteria for persuasive and narrative writing focus on ‘authorial’ techniques, like Ideas, Audience, Cohesion, Character and setting, and Persuasive devices.

Meanwhile, the ‘secretarial’ side of writing (Spelling and Punctuation) only accounts for 23% of the marks available.

So it’s important to teach students the authorial skills they need to become engaging writers.

Does Seven Steps teach the authorial skills?

Yes! The Seven Steps explicitly teaches students the authorial skills of writing – originality, creativity, the craft of writing. Why? Because they’re the writing techniques that entertain, inform and persuade the reader.

And this naturally leads to the improvements that so many Seven Steps schools see in their NAPLAN writing results.

Scroll down for some of our most popular NAPLAN resources and support your students to approach the writing test with confidence.

‘Our NAPLAN writing results in Year 9 were against the national trend, which showed a drop, whereas our results went up by 11.4%. I guarantee our writing success was due to the Seven Steps. Students love it!’

– Valissa Bauer, Literacy Coach

'Our Year 5 NAPLAN writing results have improved so much (particularly among the targeted boys) that our auditor initially did not believe our data! He wanted to take it home and study it. Wow!'

– Genevieve Clark, Literacy Coach

'In 2019, less than 25% of students in Years 3-6 could compose a “satisfactory" piece of writing. Two years later, 90% are achieving in the top two bands! Seven Steps has given us the strategies to go for gold!'

– Mary Semaan, Head of Primary

Free resources to improve your students’ NAPLAN writing results

Jen’s NAPLAN Super Summary & Samples

A handy compilation of Seven Steps founder Jen McVeity’s most valuable takeaways, designed to help your students plan, write and edit a response under test conditions. Plus, a collection of the responses she wrote for each NAPLAN topic to help you model great writing in your classroom.

Incorporating these insights and actions into your NAPLAN prep is a sure-fire way to help your students approach the writing test with the confidence they need to perform at their best.

Get it for free

A simple guide to NAPLAN writing

We’ve put together a comprehensive guide to NAPLAN writing on the blog.

Uncover insights into the NAPLAN writing task and ACARA’s expectations.
Learn what to focus on in the lead-up to NAPLAN to make the biggest difference to your students’ writing.
Find out how to reflect on the NAPLAN writing task as a class to further students’ learning.

Visit the blog