Schools on the Rise 2026 — NSW

A raw top-of-table leaderboard tends to show the same advantaged names year after year. This page does something different: it ranks every eligible NSW school by its mean NAPLAN score in 2024 and again in 2025, then highlights the schools whose position climbed the most. It is an improvement-first leaderboard — a discovery signal for schools that are on the move.

Rank movement is not a verdict on teaching quality, and a single strong year can be noise as easily as a trend. Treat this as a starting point for questions, then look at the school directly. For the raw latest-year table, see Top NAPLAN schools.

For each school type we compare the two most recent NAPLAN years, 2024 and 2025. A school qualifies only if it published at least 3 of the five NAPLAN subjects (reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy) in a year; its score for that year is the mean across the subjects it did publish. Primary uses Year 5, secondary uses Year 9.

We rank every eligible school in each year, then limit the universe to the top 12% of eligible schools by latest-year mean NAPLAN. A school's rank change is its 2024 rank minus its 2025 rank, so a positive number means it climbed positions. The schools with the largest positive movement are listed above, with the two subjects that contributed most to the change.