The eSafety Commissioner last week announced a comprehensive evaluation* of the social media minimum age restrictions (also known as the social media ban) introduced in Australia in December, 2025. It’s clearly a well-designed evaluation project, run by an expert team. The study design has been preregistered and you can read the details on the Open Science Framework.
It is excellent to see this level of expert planning being put into an evaluation of a policy that impacts children and young people – something we don’t often see in evaluations of policies implemented in schools.
One aspect of this comprehensive plan that caught my eye, however, was the inclusion of NAPLAN results as an outcome. The evaluation project will use data linkage techniques to include several administrative datasets, including NAPLAN data, to supplement the quantitative survey and qualitative focus group data.
Is NAPLAN a good outcome to look at when attempting to evaluate a social-media ban for teenagers?
There is such a range of data collected in and by Australian schools, but to date it has been reasonably difficult (both costly and time-consuming) to link different administrative datasets for research. I suspect the decision to link NAPLAN – as well as health data – was made simply because NAPLAN is there. It is a nationally administered educational assessment and it is possible to link the results to other data.
The study protocol mentions administrative data, but does not provide any detail about why NAPLAN has been chosen:
Going to the considerable effort of matching NAPLAN to the participants’ survey data should really rest on a strong theoretical basis. That is, what theory suggests that a social media ban should result in improved NAPLAN scores?
If we go back to the eSafety Commissioner website a rationale for the social media ban can be found. But the potential benefits do not include expected improvements on standardised literacy and numeracy tests.
Why the change?
| The age restrictions aim to protect under-16s from pressures and risks they can be exposed to while logged in to social media accounts. These come from design features in the platforms that:encourage them to spend too much time on screens – for example, by prompting them with streams of notifications and alerts, and pressuring them to view disappearing contentincrease the likelihood of exposure to negative, upsetting or manipulative content served up in their feeds by algorithms.These features have been linked to harms to health and wellbeing – including increased stress levels, and reduced sleep and concentration. |
Why might a social media ban not improve NAPLAN?
I suspect that as an outcome, NAPLAN is too distal to be impacted by the changes in teenagers’ lives wrought by the ban. NAPLAN assesses whether students are learning some of the academic skills we expect them to learn as they progress through school. I say ‘some of the skills’ because NAPLAN provides a very limited snapshot of what students learn in school). Teachers, who deliver the curriculum which underpins the NAPLAN tests, are not directly involved in the implementation of the ban. Neither curriculum nor teaching practices will change as part of the policy. It’s really a social policy, not an education policy.
I imagine these two aspects like ships passing in the night: on one ship are teachers delivering curriculum and students learning and being assessed on NAPLAN tests. On the other ship are children and teens restricted social media use and the impacts of this change on social and psychological development. There are cross-overs, of course: students themselves are active in both contexts. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that one thing (the social media ban) will impact the other (NAPLAN results).
Improvements are harder to demonstrate
Partly my view is informed by a long history of educational intervention evaluation syntheses reported by the What Works Clearinghouse and other similar agencies over many years. One issue uncovered by this work is that even in high-quality educational interventions implemented in real schools with teachers and students, it is much more difficult to improve standardised test results compared with tests that align with the specific interventions. Whether or not treatment-aligned outcomes should be included in evaluations of educational interventions remains a topic of contention (indeed an entire issue of the Educational Researcher journal was dedicated to debating this issue way back in 2008).
Writing this year about the field of reading disability interventions, David Francis and Paulina Kulesz put it this way:
“A general consensus exists that disabilities are harder to treat in older students and improvements are harder to demonstrate on standardized tests.”
It is hard to imagine therefore why we should expect improvements on a standardised test like NAPLAN when the proposed intervention is not aligned with curriculum, not implemented in schools, and does not involve teachers or classrooms in any way.
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*The evaluation project will be led by eSafety’s Research and Evaluation team in partnership with a group of national and international experts. This study has already recruited over 4000 parent-child dyads and the baseline data collection was completed in November 2025.
Sally Larsen is a senior lecturer in education at the University of New England. She researches reading and maths development across the primary and early secondary school years in Australia, interrogating NAPLAN.
This article was originally published on EduResearch Matters. Read the original article.
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