But come Tuesday, May 15 more than a million year 3 and 5 students around the country will sit for the controversial test.

NSW Primary Principals Association president Phil Seymour for one is hoping it is the last NAPLAN test of its kind.

The Hayes Park Public School principal has been a long time critic, who was “ecstatic” when a NAPLAN review was proposed.

The increasing opposition to NAPLAN had Mr Seymour hoping the “poor test” would actually be scrapped sooner.

Especially when NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes, used a meeting of education ministers last Friday to call on the federal government to replace NAPLAN in “haste” with a less high-stakes test that assesses each student's progress as recommended by the Gonski report.

Read more: NAPLAN critics need to ‘think of children’ before scrapping it

But the proposal was not supported by Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham.

“Now we [PPA] agree with Mr Stokes that it [NAPLAN] could be stopped because there are much richer ways of finding out how children are performing and how schools are performing. We don’t think that NAPLAN actually does that,” Mr Seymour said.

He said the PPA did not like the way the MySchool website data was used.

“People are comparing schools and judging schools on this really incomplete test and it doesn’t show anything like what schools are doing.

“So for that reason we think it is very poor and we’ve called for a review,” Mr Seymour said.

“There have been some pluses to the tool. We are putting things in place. The Gonski 2.0 recommendations look at a stronger use of formative assessment but NAPLAN as it is doesn’t work.”

Read more: Illawarra education experts call for overhaul to ‘severely defective’ NAPLAN tests

Mr Seymour also expressed concern that an increased amount of paperwork and data collection was taking teachers from their prime role of teaching.

He pointed to a University of Sydney study of more than 18,000 public school teachers and principals across NSW, which found 97.3 per cent reported an increase in administration duties over the past five years.

“It is high tide for our education authorities to look at the workload they are pushing onto principals, executives and teachers,” Mr Seymour said.

“The Teachers Federation in consultation with Sydney University has just done a huge study - 18,000 responded, all complaining of the increased amount of workload relating to paperwork and data collection that is taking teachers from their prime role of teaching.

“It’s just the latest of many reviews showing what teachers and principals already know – we’re being drowned by paperwork.”