Differing slightly from the views of the national parent body, NSW P&C Federation president Susie Boyd wants “this NAPLAN” removed immediately by a “completely different” national test.

She expressed her views to the Mercury as thousands of Illawarra primary school students get ready to sit for NAPLAN tests on Tuesday.

Mrs Boyd agreed with NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes that the national test was being used dishonestly as a school rating system and had sprouted an industry that extorts money from desperate families.

”The people who write the test are putting out NAPLAN books, NAPLAN CD’s and running NAPLAN camps. They are making money from worried parents,” she said.

“Parents are concerned because they feel their kids must reach all these goals of NAPLAN because they are also using the NAPLAN results in league tables and to define where kids go and are placed in their high school classes.

“It’s ridiculous. It is not doing what it was first created to do. It may have done in the beginning but it has slowly morphed into now quite an unmanageable beast.”

Mrs Boyd said regardless parents still wanted a national test.

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

“As parents we do want to know where our kids are but we don’t want this beast they have created. They are making a motza of money from it at the expense of parents,” she said.

Competition was the answer, Mrs Boyd said.

“What I mean by that is doing a review of the test every five or six years and have new people administer the test.

“We can’t allow for the same people who write the test and provide all these wonderful resources for children to jib the system to continue doing it.”

Read more: Illawarra principal says NAPLAN can be scrapped sooner than later

Mrs Boyd wants a national test in a very different form to what it is now.

She welcomed more input from those involved in the curriculum, including from teachers, NESA and even ACARA, which administers NAPLAN.

In an open letter to teachers, ACARA (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority) CEO Robert Randall said “NAPLAN doesn’t test everything that happens in your classroom – and it isn’t designed to. Instead, NAPLAN is intended to complement your school-level literacy and numeracy assessments.”

The letter stated that every student should be encouraged to continue their daily classroom learning with their peers.... there is no need to specifically prepare for NAPLAN.

More than a million students will sit for NAPLAN from May 15.