Don’t Let 2028 Fail Another Generation

A briefing on transcription, NAPLAN and the 2028 reversal 

Graham East — Founder and Managing Director, EdAlive; former primary classroom teacher 

Disclosure. The author publishes Typing Tournament, an Australian keyboarding programme named in this briefing, and has a commercial interest in its recommendations. The programme’s efficacy research is developer-generated, not peer-reviewed, and cohort-level rather than student-level. No competing product is named; any publisher, researcher or authority who wishes to reply is invited to, and replies will be published in full. 

At a glance 

The measured failure	Median NSW Year 5 typing speed: 15.4 wpm — slower than handwriting
The cost	15–20 NAPLAN scaled points lost online versus paper, same students
The mechanism	+7.5 points recovered per +5 wpm of typing speed ($\beta = 1.5$, $p < .001$)
The neglect	9 minutes a week on keyboarding vs 31 minutes on handwriting
What is proposed instead	0 — from 2028 every primary writing test is handwritten
What has been published to justify that	0 studies on typing speed and writing scores, from any Australian authority

Purpose 

This briefing argues three things: 

1. Australian schooling has failed to teach transcription — the mechanical act of turning language into text, by hand or keyboard — and the failure is now measurable. 

2. The 2028 return of Year 5 NAPLAN writing to pen and paper is being executed without the evidence that would justify it, and will swap one form of assessment inequity for another rather than resolve it. 

3. The remedy is not a choice of mode, but the measurement and teaching of both. 

1. The failure is measurable 

The word exists; the measure does not. 

• New South Wales uses transcription well: the English K–10 Syllabus (2022) contains a discrete focus area, Handwriting and digital transcription, with its own Stage 2 and 3 outcomes, and departmental sequences prescribing three explicit sessions a week of 15–20 minutes, naming touch typing, and directing teachers to value accuracy over speed. 

• Nationally, ACARA uses “handwriting and keyboarding”. 

• The phrase “touch typing” appears nowhere in the Australian Curriculum. 

• Keyboarding is the only mandated skill in the curriculum with no named content description in any learning area — the requirement lives entirely inside a general capability. 

• Across every document, including NSW’s, three things are missing: a number, an instrument, and an owner. 

What an unmeasured obligation attracts. 

NSW asks students to monitor typing rate and accuracy “according to goals and given criteria” while the mandatory syllabus supplies neither. The national progression’s terminal descriptor — P8 — says only that the student “demonstrates automaticity when using keyboarding and screen functions.” Automatic how fast? To what accuracy? Judged when, by whom, reported where? 

The consequence is visible in the timetable: 

• 31 minutes a week on handwriting. 

• 9 minutes a week on keyboarding. 

• 57 minutes a week in which students are expected to write on devices. 

• Over 98 per cent of primary teachers agree keyboarding matters. 

• ~75 per cent received no training in teaching computer-based writing. 

• 84 per cent report little confidence teaching it. 

(Malpique, Valcan, Pino-Pasternak & Ledger, 2025) 

What happens when someone finally measures it. 

The Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (CESE, 2021) took 1,651 Year 2–5 students across 69 schools, gave them paired paper and computer NAPLAN writing tasks, then a three-minute typing test: 

• Median Year 5 typing speed: 15.4 wpm (Year 3: 8.7; Year 4: 10.3; Year 2: 5.3) — slower than they write by hand, after years of daily screen use. 

• Holding student, school and task constant, primary students scored 15 to 20 NAPLAN scaled points lower on computer than on paper — 0.2 to 0.3 of a standard deviation. 

• Typing speed drove that penalty ($\beta = 1.5$, $p < .001$). Every +5 wpm closed the gap by roughly 7.5 scaled points. 

• Most trial schools did not explicitly teach keyboarding. 

The uncomfortable implication: every NAPLAN writing score in Australia is a composition score multiplied by a transcription score — and only one of the two has ever been measured. 

2. The denial, and the vacuum it left 

What ACARA has stated, for years. 

• “The writing test is not about handwriting skills and NAPLAN is not about keyboarding skills.” 

• “Students do not have to be able to touch type to successfully complete the test.” 

• In the same document: familiarity with typing is “a requirement of the Australian Curriculum.” 

What ACARA has published to support the first two claims. 

Nothing. An audit of its own NAPLAN Online Research and Development repository: 

• 13 studies across six categories — tailored test development, automated essay scoring, device suitability, student engagement, readability and layout, accessibility. 

• Not one measures student words per minute against NAPLAN writing marks. 

• The summary report mentions a 2012 pilot in a single paragraph, asserts without data that online delivery “would not substantially change the assessment properties,” and rests on engagement interviews noting that “no students reported feeling penalised for typing their responses” (Lazendic, Justus & Rabinowitz, 2014, p. 3). 

• Eleven-year-olds did not feel penalised, so the national authority declared there was no penalty. 

What the only Australian evidence shows. 

• No Australian education authority — other than the NSW CESE team in 2016 — has published a study on typing speed and writing scores. 

• CESE recommended the opposite of abandonment: schools should “identify an effective method for developing students’ typing fluency” and monitor it “for students beyond Year 3” (CESE, 2021, p. 6). 

• The 2020 NAPLAN Review Final Report independently concluded that explicit keyboarding instruction and monitoring beyond Year 3 “are essential in developing students’ writing skills and for equitable participation in computer-based writing assessments” (McGaw, Louden & Wyatt-Smith, 2020, p. 84). 

• Neither recommendation was implemented. 

• The only analysis of live NAPLAN Online writing results against typing fluency in Australia was conducted by a software publisher on its own data: 2019 Year 5, 99 schools, cohort ≈5,350, each school compared to its socio-economic Similar Schools benchmark. 69 of 99 at or above benchmark, average margin +7.1 writing marks ($p = 0.000002$), holding across sector and location (Brash, 2020). 

What that finding can and cannot bear. 

• Not peer-reviewed; developer-published. 

• Cohort-level, not student-level — it cannot show the fastest typists wrote best. 

• Sample sits 10.9 marks above the national mean; the author states it “was not a random representation of Australian schools.” 

• But its margin converges almost exactly with CESE’s independent trial prediction from the opposite direction: ~7.5 points per 5 wpm, saturating where typing overtakes handwriting. 

Two consequences. 

• Teachers were told in writing the skill did not matter — and 300,000 rational professionals in a crowded timetable concluded it was not their responsibility. 

• The system now proposes to reverse course with no evidence at all. 

3. What 2028 would do 

What was decided. On 2 November 2026, ministers agreed Year 5 NAPLAN writing returns to pen and paper from 2028 — making every primary writing assessment handwritten. NSW wants Years 7 and 9 to follow, with ACARA to advise. 

The case for it is not frivolous. 

• Australia’s most recent PISA results were its worst. 

• Students report 2.6 hours a day on devices at school, against an OECD average of 1.7. 

• There is genuine evidence handwriting does specific developmental work in early literacy — letter recognition, reading circuitry, composition quality — and that handwriting fluency uniquely predicts writing quality after controlling for attitude, language background, gender, grade and school (Santangelo & Graham, 2016; James & Engelhardt, 2012; Skar et al., 2022). 

What the change actually achieves. 

• It does not make the test neutral between modes. A handwritten test is just as much a transcription test as a keyboarded one — it gates on a different set of muscles. 

• All that changes is which children are throttled, and whether anyone can see it. 

• It removes the only large-scale task in Australian schooling in which fluent keyboarding paid off. 

• Within one planning cycle, digital transcription becomes the focus area that gets the last ten minutes of a Friday afternoon — or nothing. 

Who gets throttled. 

• Students with dysgraphia. 

• Students with developmental coordination disorder, hypermobility or fine-motor delay — handwriting slow and painful while typing is fluent and unremarkable. 

• ACARA’s own Northern Territory trial recorded such students finding it “easier to engage with the task online because typing reduced their anxiety in producing legible pieces of writing” (Lazendic et al., 2014, p. 11). 

• Students in schools that issued devices from Year 3 and treated the pen as optional. 

Reasonable adjustments exist — extra time, a scribe, a laptop — but they are discretionary, require a diagnosis and an advocate, and vary by school and state. An adjustment is what you offer when the assessment was designed for somebody else. 

4. Where the analogue argument breaks down 

Senior secondary assessment has no handwritten equivalent for a large share of its content. 

• Design and Technology — Major Design Project and a working design folio: design matrices, Gantt charts, Bill of Materials, data-driven testing. Extended expository prose inside a spreadsheet, with live cell references and formula logic, plus a second document in CAD. 

• Business Studies — business reports, financial statements, cash-flow projections, break-even analysis, ratio calculations, built live in a spreadsheet. 

• And the same pattern elsewhere — data logging and software graphing in Science; geographic information systems in Geography; digital sources and bibliographies in English Advanced and Extension; submitted works and portfolios in Software Design and Development, Industrial Technology, Visual Arts and Music. 

• School-based assessment — the majority of final marks in several subjects — is overwhelmingly digital in practice, even where submission rules remain mode-agnostic. 

The questions no proponent has answered. 

• Are Design and Technology students to hand-draw their CAD? 

• Are Business Studies students to rule up spreadsheets on graph paper? 

• Is a four-thousand-word design folio, complete with design matrix and Bill of Materials, to be produced in biro? 

When, exactly, were students supposed to learn this? 

• If primary schools cease teaching keyboarding and cease providing timetabled, supervised device access… 

• …while secondary schools assume both as prerequisites… 

• …the skill is abolished in the only window in which it can be built. 

• A student entering Year 11 at 18 wpm will not be taught to type, to use a formula, or to structure a folio. They will be taught that school is where you fall behind. 

And typing is only the first layer. Digital competence is a stack: 

• Keyboard fluency 

• File and information management 

• Spreadsheets and formulas 

• Referencing and citation tools 

• Data visualisation and collaborative platforms 

• Data representation, algorithms and web authoring (Digital Technologies) 

The osmosis assumption does not fail once. It fails all the way up. 

A final irony. HSC external examinations remain, for most subjects, pen-and-paper. Students who have spent thirteen years on keyboards without fluency instruction sit handwritten papers they can barely complete, while studying disciplines conducted overwhelmingly in software. Strip devices from primary school and you do not produce students fluent with the pen — you produce students fluent with neither. 

5. The missing instrument 

Measure both, and report both. 

Component	Mode	Measures	Marking
Writing (unchanged)	Paper from 2028	Composition	Human
Language Conventions (unchanged)	Paper from 2028	Spelling, grammar, punctuation	Human/automated
Transcription — keyboarding(new)	Online, 3 min, Years 5 and 9	Net wpm, accuracy	Fully automatic
Transcription — handwriting(new)	Paper, 1 min, Years 3 and 5	Letters per minute, legibility	Rubric, sampled moderation

Design features. 

• Same method as the CESE study — three-minute timed copy, equivalent unseen forms — so results stay comparable to the 15.4 wpm baseline. 

• Already trialled on 1,651 students; no new psychometric development required. 

• The only NAPLAN component that marks itself — zero marking cost. 

• Reported school-level to schools and systems, system-level publicly. 

• No child-level publication, no league tables, no gatekeeping on progression. The purpose is to make the invisible visible, not to rank eleven-year-olds. 

• Precedent: Utah has run this model for decades. 

Symmetry matters as much as the keyboarding task. 

• Handwriting fluency is currently required by NAPLAN and never scored. 

• Slow handwriters are penalised invisibly and nobody can identify them. 

• A keyboarding measure alone would simply invert the imbalance. 

The principle. A single-mode assessment always launders one mode’s difficulty into another mode’s mark. We have now run the experiment twice, in opposite directions, and called the resulting score a measure of writing both times. 

A student who cannot transcribe fluently in both handwriting and keyboarding is not literate for the world they live in. 

6. Recommendations 

1. Put numbers in the curriculum, for both modes. 

• Replace “demonstrates automaticity” with benchmarks in the Literacy progression and English achievement standards. 

• Proposed floor: Year 2 — 10 wpm at 95% and all letters fluent; Year 4 — 20 wpm at 95% and legible joined script; Year 6 — 30 wpm at 95% and sustained legible handwriting; Year 8 — 40 wpm at 95% and efficient pen note-taking; Year 10 — 50 wpm at 95%. 

• Set the Year 5 target provisionally at 20–25 wpm at 95% accuracy; revise once a funded study establishes the threshold properly. 

• A benchmark that can be revised is worth more than a number that is never set. 

2. Timetable it — short, frequent, supervised, in dedicated labs or class sets. 

• 15–20 minutes, three to five times a week, Years 3–6. 

• Allocated as the first priority of a school’s screen-time quota. 

• Reinstate timetabled computer labs or bookable class sets with full-sized keyboards as 1:1 and BYOD are wound back. 

• A lab beats 1:1 for this purpose: standardised software, controlled distraction, one teacher who can walk the rows. 

• Supervision written into the requirement — software teaches key location; only a person teaches key technique. 

3. Assess both modes explicitly. 

• Three minutes of auto-scored keyboarding at Years 5 and 9. 

• One minute of rubric-scored handwriting at Years 3 and 5. 

• Two Year 9 writing tasks — one by hand, one by keyboard — so the mode effect is measured per student rather than assumed away. 

4. Train the teachers, in technique as well as software. 

• Most of the workforce was never taught to teach keyboarding; many cannot touch type. 

• A national micro-credential plus a requirement in initial teacher education. 

• Fixes in five years what otherwise drifts for fifteen. 

5. Procure against a national evidence standard. 

• An evaluated register of transcription and digital tools, as we treat reading resources. 

• Minimum criteria: explicit teaching sequence; modelled fingering; accuracy-gated progression; spaced practice; per-student longitudinal records; curriculum alignment; no advertising; published efficacy data. 

• If a product cannot tell a teacher whether a child improved since February, it is not a teaching tool. 

7. Where the onus now lies 

What is at stake. 

• The validity of national assessment, and the cognitive load on every child who writes. 

• Equity of access for students with motor and learning difficulties. 

• The return on billions of dollars of public infrastructure, and the productivity of the workforce that infrastructure was meant to equip. 

What has happened. 

• For fifteen years, authorities changed classroom technology and assessment on unverified assumptions — asserting that typing would be absorbed. 

• They declared, without a single published study, that typing ability did not affect writing scores. 

• In 2026 they propose an equally sweeping reversal on an almost equally thin base. 

What follows. 

• The evidence, its sources and its limitations are now on the public record. 

• The onus is on those implementing change to validate their decisions through published research. 

• Those who disagree with this briefing are invited to support that disagreement with evidence rather than assertion. 

Selected references 

• Brash, L. (2020). Full research report: Keyboard ability significantly boosts NAPLAN results. EdAlive. 

• Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation. (2021). Are writing scores from online writing tests for primary students comparable to scores from paper-based tests? NSW Department of Education. 

• James, K. H., & Engelhardt, L. (2012). The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 1(1), 32–42. 

• Lazendic, G., Justus, J.-A., & Rabinowitz, S. (2014). Tailored test design study 2013: Summary research report. ACARA. 

• Malpique, A. A., Valcan, D., Pino-Pasternak, D., & Ledger, S. (2025). Teaching computer-based writing: Primary teachers’ preparation, self-efficacy, and instructional practices. The Australian Educational Researcher. 

• McGaw, B., Louden, W., & Wyatt-Smith, C. (2020). NAPLAN Review final report. 

• Santangelo, T., & Graham, S. (2016). A comprehensive meta-analysis of handwriting instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 28(2), 225–265. 

• Skar, G. B., et al. (2022). Handwriting fluency and the quality of primary grade students’ writing. Reading and Writing, 35(2), 509–538. 

Approximately 2,530 words, including the disclosure, at-a-glance panel and references. 

Both cuts are in: §4’s subject list is now three bullets rather than six, with Science, Geography, English and the creative/technology subjects folded into one summary line; §7’s stake list is three bullets rather than five, with infrastructure and workforce productivity combined. Nothing else in the document has changed — the thesis sentence remains at the close of §5, the at-a-glance panel is intact, and all eight references stand.