NAPLAN and the Seven Steps
Our Writing result in Year 9 is against the national trend which showed a 1.7% drop from 2014 to 2015, where our result went up by 11.4%. I can guarantee our writing success was due to students being exposed to the Seven Steps of Writing Success. Students love it.
– Valissa Bauer, Literacy Coach

NAPLAN values great writing
The Seven Steps to Writing Success focuses on teaching students the authorial side of writing – originality, creativity, the craft of writing. Why? Because that is what makes for fantastic writing that readers love.
These are also the areas that NAPLAN values most – 36/7 out of the possible 47/48 marks are attributed to author-focused criteria like Ideas, Audience, Cohesion, Character & Setting, Persuasive Devices, etc.
The ‘secretarial’ side of writing (Spelling and Punctuation) meanwhile only accounts for 11 marks.
As you can see from the NAPLAN Marketing Guides for Narrative and Persuasive, they value writing that is well-rounded and engaging. So, focus on teaching student how to become engaging writers and see the impact that it has on their results.
Build your students' authorial skills with the Seven Steps
For more ideas on how to improve your NAPLAN Writing results, check out the following resources:
- ‘NAPLAN and Sizzling Starts’ − an introduction to how the Seven Steps can improve NAPLAN results
- ‘Simple Guide to Improving NAPLAN data’ – a complete guide available on Seven Steps Online
- ‘Six Myths About NAP Persuasive’– A blog post dispelling some of the myths surrounding the NAPLAN test
- Narrative NAPLAN Writing Samples and Persuasive NAPLAN Writing Samples.

Inspiring Great Writing Can Be Easy!
“I can tell you our Year 5 NAPLAN writing results (which was the only thing going downwards in our results) has improved so much (particularly amongst 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

Learn it one day. Teach it the next.
The One-Day Inspiring Writing Workshop teaches you the seven explicit techniques to inspire your students and transform their writing. Take home over 25 Action Activities to use in your class!
See how other schools have transformed their writing
After just 10 weeks, students at Goondiwindi State School achieved an average 35% increase in their writing scores.
‘Everyone who participated displayed a confidence in their own writing. Even the Preps, when assigned a ‘scribe’ were keen to get their ideas down on paper.’


Transform writing school-wide.
Bring the excitement, passion and energy of the Seven Steps to your whole school. Invite one of our dynamic presenters to train all of your teachers and benefit from a shared language, expert writing techniques and loads of inspiration.