The PAT test explained for parents: what the ACER Progressive Achievement Tests are (PAT Maths, PAT Reading, Spelling, Science and the rest), when Australian schools sit them, how to read your child's PAT report (scale score, achievement band, percentile rank, stanine), the 2026 Australian norms year by year, what a normal year of growth looks like, how to prepare honestly, and a printable parent sheet

A PAT report comes home, or is mentioned at a parent-teacher meeting, with a scale score, a band, a percentile and a stanine on it, and very little explanation. Parents search for "PAT test" because the school has sat one and nobody has said what the numbers mean, whether 118 is good, or whether their child should be practising. This page answers all of that from ACER's own documents: what the Progressive Achievement Tests are, which tests exist and how long they take, how to read every number on the report, the January 2026 Australian norms year by year so you can place a score, what a normal year of growth looks like, what to ask the teacher, and how to prepare without buying anything.

Download the PAT parent sheet (PDF) (the tests table, the four numbers on the report, the stanine table, the 2026 maths and reading norms by year level, the questions for the parent-teacher meeting and a prep checklist; two pages, free).

What the PAT test is

PAT stands for Progressive Achievement Tests, published by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), the body that also runs the Australian side of PISA and TIMSS. ACER says more than 6,000 schools use PAT, that over 1.5 million students are assessed each year, and that 6.44 million PAT tests were delivered in 2025. It is the most widely used school-chosen assessment in the country, and it is not a national test: each school buys it, decides which tests to sit and when, and owns the results.

The word "progressive" is the point. Every PAT subject has one scale that runs from Year 1 to Year 10, so a child's result in Year 4 and in Year 5 sit on the same ruler and the difference between them is growth. ACER describes PAT as "a teacher-facing tool": its purpose is to tell teachers where each student is, what they can do and what to teach next, and to show the school how a cohort is moving. There is no pass mark, nothing goes on a certificate, and a school is not required to tell parents the result at all, though most do.

Two things follow that parents are rarely told. First, the tests are meant to be sat at the level that fits the student, not the year. ACER's guidance to schools is that a test is well targeted "when a student responds correctly to approximately 50% of questions", so a child who comes out saying "I got half of them wrong" has had exactly the test ACER intended. Second, the adaptive versions change the questions as the child answers: get one right and the next is harder, get one wrong and the next is easier. A child who says "it kept getting harder" is describing success.

The tests, and how long each takes

ACER lists fourteen PAT assessments. The two every parent meets are PAT Maths and PAT Reading, each in a fixed-form ("linear") edition with ten test levels and an adaptive edition. The table gives the current versions, from ACER's School Support pages.

The times are recommendations: ACER says students "will not be automatically locked out" when the time passes, and the teacher decides. Calculator use in PAT Maths is a school decision; ask, because the answer changes what a result means. PAT STEM Contexts, which some schools sat, has a discontinuation notice on ACER's 2026 page. New in 2026 are pen-and-paper "Secondary Transition Editions" of PAT Maths and PAT Reading, two forms each, for schools testing new Year 7 intakes.

From the start of Term 1 2026, the online tests have security features worth telling a child about in advance: the test opens full-screen, and if the student leaves full-screen or clicks out of the browser window the test screen blurs and a warning appears. A child who wanders off to check something will lose time and possibly the sitting. These apply to PAT Maths 5th Edition and Adaptive, PAT Reading 5th Edition and Adaptive, and PAT Science 2nd Edition.

When schools sit it

ACER's own advice to schools is that most test "towards the end of each school year", because that is when the skills of the year have been taught, when growth from the previous sitting can be measured, and when ACER's norm data are collected (October and November). Some schools test at the start of the year instead, to plan teaching, and some do both. School newsletters from Catholic and independent secondary schools typically describe PAT Maths and PAT Reading in Years 7 to 10 in Term 1 and Term 4; many primary schools sit them once, in Term 4, from Year 1 or Year 3.

Two ACER rules about timing matter when you read a report. Progress needs "a gap of 9 to 12 months between PAT testing sessions"; a shorter gap may not show any growth in the scale score, and that is normal. And "longitudinal growth should be measured over a minimum of two years of schooling", or three sittings, because any single sitting carries noise: a tired child, a hot room, a guessed question. One disappointing sitting is not a trend.

How to read the PAT report: the four numbers

A PAT individual report shows the student's latest scale score and the previous one, usually with a band and a percentile or stanine. The definitions below are ACER's.

The stanine table, from ACER's "Interpreting ACER Test Results":

Every scale score carries a margin of error, which ACER prints in the norm tables and which is larger at the very top and bottom of a test. ACER's example: a scale score of 37.6 with a margin of 3.5 means the true score is probably between 34.1 and 41.1. That is why a two-point change between sittings means nothing, and why the stanine rule above exists.

The 2026 Australian norms, year by year

This is the table parents want and are never given. In January 2026 ACER released new Australian norms for PAT Maths and PAT Reading, replacing the 2019-based norms used since 2022. They are built from tests sat in October and November 2024, 1,249,411 students in Years 1 to 10 for maths (from 2,321 schools in Year 1 to 3,829 in Year 6 and 897 in Year 10), weighted to match the national population by state, sector, location, socioeconomic status and gender. The figures below are ACER's Table 6 in each norms document, rounded to whole points; the published values have one decimal place.

PAT Maths scale score at each percentile, by year level (2026 norms)

PAT Reading scale score at each percentile, by year level (2026 norms)

So a PAT Maths scale score of 118 is a little above average in Year 3 (the 50th percentile is 116), a little below in Year 5 (126), and around the 25th percentile in Year 7. The same number means something different in every year, which is why the report gives a percentile.

Two cautions from ACER itself. The percentile for a given scale score changed when the norms changed: ACER's own example from the previous update was a Year 6 maths score of 136.0 moving from the 76th to the 72nd percentile, with the child's achievement unchanged. If a report printed before 2026 is being compared with one printed after, compare scale scores, not percentiles. And norms "are not recommended for setting learning targets or tracking growth"; the scale score and the band are for that.

What a normal year of growth looks like

Read the average row of either table from left to right and the most useful fact on this page appears: growth slows every year, by design of the scale. In PAT Maths the average student gains about 9 scale points from Year 1 to Year 2, 7 from Year 2 to Year 3, 6 from Year 3 to Year 4, 4 or 5 in the middle years, and about 2 a year from Year 7 onwards. In PAT Reading the early gains are larger (16 points from Year 1 to Year 2, 11 from Year 2 to Year 3) and the later ones similar (1 to 3 points a year in secondary).

So a Year 9 student whose maths scale score rose 3 points had a normal year; a Year 2 student whose score rose 3 points fell behind the cohort, even though both "went up". Parents, and some reports, treat a flat secondary score as alarming and a rising primary score as reassuring, and the table says the opposite can be true. The comparison that matters is the gain against the typical gain for that year, and the two tables above let you make it.

The spread column explains the stanine rule. One standard deviation is about 12 to 14 points in maths, so a 10-point band is less than one standard deviation, and two children a band apart in Year 8 are about five years of average growth apart, while two children a band apart in Year 2 are about one year apart. A band means more the older the child.

What the bands describe: the strands

The achievement band description is the part of a PAT report that says what to do, and it is written in terms of the strands each test measures.

PAT Maths reports three strands, matching the Australian Curriculum: Number and algebra, Measurement and space, Statistics and probability, split into eight sub-strands (whole number operations; fractions and decimals; money and financial maths; patterns and algebra; measurement; space; statistics; probability), and four proficiencies (understanding, fluency, problem solving, reasoning). A child with a low band in Year 5 is almost always weak in fractions and decimals or in worded problems, and the band description will say so.

PAT Reading reports five strands: Decoding and concepts of print (described only in the low bands, up to about 89, because above that fluency is assumed), Retrieving directly stated information, Interpreting explicit information, Interpreting implied information, and Reflecting on the text. The band descriptions move from "simple, direct matches between key words in the question and the text" in the 80 to 89 band to "nuanced and subtle inferences from complex texts" and evaluating diagrammatic texts in the 150 and above band. A child who reads fluently but scores low is nearly always losing the interpreting-implied and reflecting questions, which is a teachable skill, not a reading problem.

Ask the teacher which strand was weakest. ACER's reports show it item by item, and that one answer is worth more than the percentile.

PAT and NAPLAN, side by side

The two are not comparable number for number. A child can be "Strong" in NAPLAN numeracy and in stanine 5 in PAT Maths without contradiction. How to read the other report is in NAPLAN results: how to read the report and what the bands mean.

What to ask at the parent-teacher meeting

1. The scale score this time and last time, and how many months apart. Less than nine months and no growth is expected; more than two years of sittings is the trend.
2. The achievement band and its description. What can the child do, and what are they "learning to" do? That second list is the plan.
3. The weakest strand, and in reading, whether it was retrieving, interpreting or reflecting.
4. Whether the test was well targeted. A child who got nearly everything right or nearly everything wrong has a score with a wide margin of error, and the next sitting should be a different test level.
5. Which norms the percentile uses. 2026 norms give a different percentile from 2019 norms for the same score.
6. What the plan is before the next sitting, at school and at home.

The teacher is allowed to show you your own child's report one-to-one. ACER's guidance to schools is to discuss results with parents individually, never to show other students' data, and to use the discussion to "celebrate strengths, identify learning needs, and set goals".

How to prepare, honestly

There is no official PAT practice test and there cannot be one. ACER's items are its intellectual property and its guidance to schools is that they "should not, under any circumstances, be provided to students outside of the testing environment". Anyone selling "PAT practice tests" is selling something else. A child drilled on look-alike questions also gains nothing from the test itself, because the result is meant to tell the teacher what the child can do.

What does help is the ordinary work the strands measure, which is the Australian Curriculum for the child's year:

• Maths: number facts and fraction operations to automatic (the sub-strands fractions and decimals, and whole number operations, carry most of the low-band descriptions); reading a table, a graph and a measurement scale; one worded problem a day with the working written out and the answer checked against the question.
• Reading: twenty minutes a day across text types, not only stories: an information text, a set of instructions, a diagram or table with a caption. After each, one retrieving question (what did it say?), one interpreting question (what did it mean?) and one reflecting question (why did the writer choose that word, that order, that picture?). The last kind is where most of the marks above band 120 are.
• Test habits: read every question twice; expect it to get hard, and in the adaptive test treat that as a sign it is working; never leave the test window; use the whole recommended time rather than racing.
• The week before: sleep, not revision. PAT measures the year, and a week changes nothing in the score except the margin of error.

Where a report shows a child a band or more below the year's average in a strand, a few months of targeted 1-on-1 work on that strand before the next sitting is the one intervention that shows in the next scale score, because the test is built to detect exactly that growth. Where the maths struggle is general, why students struggle with maths in Australia sets out what the data shows and what parents can do; for a child heading for a selective school test, the PAT bands are a fair early guide, and the selective school exam in every state says what that test asks.

Download the PAT parent sheet (PDF) (the tests table, the four numbers on the report, the stanine table, the 2026 maths and reading norms by year level, the questions for the parent-teacher meeting and a prep checklist; two pages, free).

Where to get help

A 1-on-1 online class with a tutor who holds a master's in mathematics and teaches Australian Curriculum maths and English to Years 3 to 12, at Australian times (7:30 am before school, 4 pm to 6:30 pm after school, and weekend mornings, Sydney time): the PAT or NAPLAN report read together in the free 30-minute first class, the weak strand found from it, and the next months spent on that strand with every line of working read. The NAPLAN and Australian maths page says what the class works on by year; the Year 12 page covers the senior years. Sources for this page: ACER's PAT pages and School Support articles (assessments, administration times, choosing a test level, when to test, sharing results with parents, what's new in 2026), ACER's "Interpreting ACER Test Results", and ACER's "PAT Maths: Australian norms" and "PAT Reading: Australian norms" (January 2026).

Questions parents ask

See how we teach this, 1-on-1 online →