National Catholic Education executive director Jacinta Collins said 105 Catholic schools were among the top 500 Australian schools achieving well above the average progress in their NAPLAN scores between 2019 and 2021.

This included Holy Cross Catholic Primary School in Helensburgh.

Holy Cross Catholic Primary School principal Kaylene Duffin was particularly happy with how well students improved their performances across the board from 2019 to 2021.

"We were really pleased with all our results actually across the board for years 3 and years 5 but in particular we are very proud of the growth we had in writing over the last couple of years, which was really great," she said.

The NAPLAN data, released on the updated My School website this week, includes the percentage of students whose progress was better than expected.

Holy Cross scored above national and state average in year 3 reading, writing, spelling and grammar.

The school's year 5 students did even better, with their scores of 556 for reading and 539 for writing, placing the school 'well above' the state and national average. The year 5 grammar score of 550 was also above the state and national average.

"We did very well and we are extremely proud," Mrs Duffin said. "Over the last few years we have been really committed to developing a culture to focus on collaborative professionalism."

"We've also got a really dynamic instructional coach [Natalie Baker] who works closely with our teachers and guides them to help them maximise learning. She gives feedback to teachers that have had a lot of improvement in their practice and she delivers quality professional learning just to make sure that what the teachers are teaching is current evidence-based and high impact strategies. Now we have good quality assessments to help the teachers to identify where the students are at.