In Bega, St Patrick’s Primary School, Bega Public School, Bega West Public School, Thomas More Christian Montessori School and Sapphire Coast Anglican College all celebrated significant student improvement across the core areas of reading, writing, spelling grammar and punctuation and numeracy.

Bega Public School principal Troy Mott said the results were a positive gauge of student growth and the success of whole-school programs.

“We placed substantially above state average in a number of key areas and, given our high level of student participation in the testing, the data is a useful snapshot of how the school is doing,” Mr Mott said

“It also allows us to target areas we need to work on - spelling emerged as our greatest area of need and we have developed a range of programs and professional development activities to address this.

“This data is, however, only a starting point for understanding a school’s performance and I encourage all parents to come and discuss our programs with us rather than relying on the My School website for information.”

Principal of Bega West Public School Alana Lockerbie reiterated the limitations of NAPLAN, but said she was pleased with the outcome.

“We have taken part in NAPLAN over three years now and we are very happy with the learning growth evidenced from Kinder-garten to Year 5.

“Having been identified as a fairly low socio-economic school, for our students to show the level of improvement they have is testament to their hard work and the teaching programs we have in place.”

Bega West students performed substantially above the State average in Year 3 and above the State average in Year 5.

At St Patrick’s, students made large gains in reading and writing, with Year 5 students performing above the State average in almost all areas of literacy and numeracy.

St Patrick’s principal Gerard Hergenhan said the results showed the school’s intensive reading program was working and that grammar and punctuation would now be a focus in the younger Years.

Montessori School students performed well above the state average in Year 3 with reading, spelling and numeracy being the strongest areas.

Year 5 results at the Montessori school were also encouraging, with no core area recorded as being below the State average.

Sapphire Coast Angli-can College matched its outstanding high school results with some excellent primary school figures.

Students in Years 3 and 5 at the Anglican college showed that they were particularly good writers, and the college placed on or above the state average in all areas of literacy and numeracy.

• More school results in Tuesday’s BDN