The greatest danger in using the NRS is that providers will teach to the indicators and assume that by completing one task once, such as a shift report, that’s enough to claim an outcome.

As the Assessment Principles clearly state, one-off assessment tasks do not provide a reliable and valid measure of competence. To claim that six workers achieved writing skills at Level 2 by successfully completing a shift report, you would have to be sure that this had occurred a number of times and that such writing skills were also evident in the completion of other familiar types of forms or notes. It would be too easy and against basic principles of good practice to rely on rote learning so that the only evidence you had of the workers’ achievement was the filling out of one standard shift report over and over again so that basic grammatical mistakes eventually disappeared.

It is a bit like training someone to fill in their name and address on one type of form. While this may be a starting point, there is no guarantee that such a skill can be adapted by the person to other purposes, and is certainly not the level of skill that Level 2 or 3 suggest.