For five years, a national testing program has been conducted in Australia. The National Assessment Program provides a basis for measuring improvement against the goals of the 2008 Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians and subsequently the National Education Agreement, which embodies a range of Council of Australian Governments (COAG) goals and targets, including Closing the Gap targets. After five years it might be expected that the data would show some change. The Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation's Remote Education Systems has used existing publicly available data drawn from the MySchool website to determine what has happened for schools in very remote Australia. The analysis shows that for very remote schools attendance rates have not changed significantly over the five years. Reading scores at any year have not changed significantly. Numeracy scores have declined significantly for year 3 in schools with greater than 80 per cent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. The broader aim of the paper is to question what the findings might mean for the provision of an advantageous education for remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. It raises questions about issues of accountability, equity and how success might be better defined.