School report: not good enough

That would be the wrong conclusion to draw. The real work is just getting started.

The increased Commonwealth funding is tied to practical, evidence-based reforms, and new targets for student learning.

The reforms are in the right direction – in particular the nods to stronger professional development and better curriculum and assessment tools for teachers – but whether they have any impact will depend heavily on how the reforms are implemented.

It is entirely possible that, to avoid offending fractious stakeholders, governments water down reforms to the point where nothing much changes at all.

Australia’s recent record on improving student performance is not strong. Student results – in both the government and non-government sectors – have been stagnating.

Australia is well off the pace set by the world’s best education systems. Just 12 per cent of our students excelled in the OECD’s 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment maths tests, compared to 41 per cent of Singaporean students.

We are even bested by some of our traditional peers – 22 per cent of England’s year 4 students performed at the “advanced” level in the 2023 Trends in International Maths and Science study, compared to just 13 per cent in Australia.

Poor performance among Australian students is also persistent and pervasive.

In 2025, about one in three students were below proficient in the NAPLAN reading and numeracy tests. Even in Victoria and the ACT, the most advantaged jurisdictions, more than a quarter of students fall short.

Under the new national funding agreement, states and territories have agreed to lift the proportion of students who meet the proficiency benchmark in the NAPLAN tests for reading and numeracy by 10 per cent by 2030.

This is a reasonable goal for the higher-performing states and territories but it is not enough for those starting further behind.

In Queensland and Tasmania, close to 40 per cent of students are currently not proficient in reading or numeracy. In the Northern Territory, almost 60 per cent of students fall short.

For these states and territories, the new targets are too low.

The Northern Territory, for example, will meet its 2030 target if it manages to get only four extra students in every 100 to reach the proficiency benchmark.

Meanwhile, the ACT is required to get seven extra students in every 100 over the line.

To really turn around school performance, Australia needs a mindset shift on the part of education ministers, their department bureaucrats, and the broader public.

Ministers need to start genuinely believing that substantial improvements in results are possible, and commit to the hard work needed to deliver.

Just as important, the public must start holding ministers to account for their performance.

As a start, the new targets must be seen as a floor, not a ceiling, on the level of ambition for Australia’s children.

Next, governments need to significantly dial up the rigour and dosage of evidence-based professional learning for teachers and school leaders. Compared to Singapore and England, the quality of classroom-relevant training offered to Australian teachers is embarrassingly inadequate.

Take primary maths. In Singapore, primary teachers can enrol in a 24-hour course focused on teaching measurement in the lower primary years, or a 12-hour course focused on challenging mathematically able lower primary students. In England, primary teachers can sign up for a fully funded 12-month “Leading Primary Maths” program, which follows a rigorous curriculum endorsed by the Education Endowment Foundation, and with the quality of training providers independently inspected.

There is simply nothing of equivalent rigour and dosage in Australia. It is little wonder that primary school students in those countries outperform ours.

We must also ensure schools have access to genuinely high-quality curriculum materials and assessments. Individual teachers simply can’t develop rigorous materials on their own.

Governments love investing in resources, but history suggests they tend to lose interest in updating materials over time, and can be slow to respond to teacher feedback or emerging evidence on stronger practice.

Unless the quality of all comprehensive curriculum materials is assured by an independent, expert, unbiased body, there is little reason to think government-developed materials will be any better than what is already available.

Politicians love to talk about how education has the power to change lives. They’re right. But Australia’s young people are relying on these leaders to believe what they say and deliver what they promise – genuine equity and excellence in education, and quickly too.