New figures from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) show Australian students’ ICT literacy has dropped to its lowest point since testing began in 2005 — despite young people being more digitally immersed than any generation before them.
Just half (50%) of Year 6 students attained the proficient standard – a decline from 55% in 2022 and is also lower than the national percentages observed in 2011. For Year 10 students, a mere 37% attained the proficient standard, which is the lowest percentage observed since the assessment's inception.
Education Minister Jason Clare has tasked the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) with investigating the results.
“These results have been trending down for two decades. At the same time, more and more children have had access to digital technology and devices. It begs the question: what is going on here?” Minister Clare said, adding that AI will be a topic in focus at an Education Ministers Meeting to be held later this year.
“The even bigger question is what AI is doing and will do to learning. The challenge is to support teachers and students to use it safely, ethically and in a way that supports learning, not undermines it.”
Swinburne education expert Melinda Davis, who helped write both the Victorian Curriculum for Media and the inaugural Australian Curriculum for The Arts F–10, says Australia’s declining digital literacy results say more about schools testing outdated skills than worsening abilities.
“The ACARA tests weren’t assessing digital literacy in any meaningful or contemporary sense,” Davis said. “Editing a blog post or analysing data to troubleshoot a website doesn’t reflect the real-world digital challenges young people face every day.”
Davis said none of these tasks tested what actually matters now: whether students can check digitally sourced information accurately, identify visual manipulation, or critically evaluate AI-generated sources.
“There is a widespread assumption that students naturally develop media and digital literacy skills through everyday technology use, but students aren’t being systematically taught these capabilities,” she said.
“Media and digital literacy are embedded throughout the curriculum, yet Media Arts is rarely taught as a stand-alone subject and not always by trained Media teachers.”
Davis said this leaves many students without the explicit teaching needed to understand how meaning changes across media platforms or how digital content influences behaviour and decision-making online.
“Australia already has the expertise needed to address the problem through its highly regarded Media curriculum and trained educators, but lacks clear national policy prioritising media and digital literacy as an essential skill alongside numeracy and English literacy,” she said.
“Until media and digital literacy are treated as essential learning, we should expect to keep measuring decline in outdated tests.”