Twenty years ago, a national inquiry into how Australian children were taught to read sounded the alarm on falling literacy. Since then, governments have commissioned review after review – Gonski, national numeracy panels, phonics checks, the $16.5bn Better and Fairer Schools Agreement – each promising to turn the tide.
Fast-forward to 2026 and the numbers tell the same story: too many students are still falling behind in the basics.
The results from the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessment shows Australian students recorded their worst ever results in maths and reading, with 15-year-olds now two and a half years behind teenagers who went to school at the turn of the century.
So, what’s going wrong?
Research shows that student learning outcomes continue to slide despite record levels of state and federal funding of Australia’s schools.
One study published in 2024 found that despite a 43% increase in Federal and State Governments spending on schools between 2012-2022, key OECD PISA results declined by 3% over the same period.
In this period, Federal Government funding increased by 75%, while State Government spending increased by 32%. The research also found that in dollar terms, adjusted for inflation, total State and Federal Government spending on Australia's schools increased from $55bn in 2012 to $79bn in 2022.
The system needs fixing, not the students
Victorian mathematics educator Emeritus Professor Kaye Stacey has spent years inside the machinery that produces the PISA rankings, chairing PISA's international maths expert group and working across 18 countries' school systems.
She says the biggest contributing factors to the 20-year decline in students' maths scores have been less about students and more about the system built around them.
"Growing inequity in schools has an impact on the life chances of individuals and on Australia's place in our technologically competitive world," Professor Stacey told The Educator. "PISA rankings reflect average performance, so everyone matters."
On Australia's sliding numeracy scores, Professor Stacey said a common way of framing maths may be quietly working against students.
"A prevalent view of the mathematics curriculum is as a long series of ‘dot points’ describing specific skills that need to be covered, then ticked off, often not to be seen again until next year, if ever," she said. "This is frequently seen in schools’ work plans, explicit teaching resources, assessments, textbooks and tutoring programs. This approach seems designed to minimise connections and maximise forgetting."
Another important consideration, said Professor Stacey, is that assessment has a big influence on what is taught and learned.
"Mathematics assessment is increasingly dominated by short multiple-choice questions testing simple factual knowledge and routine procedures, with only the final answer being inspected," she said. "We need regular assessment of students’ ability to solve multi-step problems, explain reasoning clearly and evaluate their results."
When asked what she thinks needs to change for Australia to turn the tables in the most meaningful way on students' maths outcomes, Professor Stacey said governments must fix inequitable school funding, and increase efforts to make government schools "an excellent choice for every family". T
"They can provide financial incentives to well qualified undergraduates to become mathematics teachers... they can support out of field teachers in substantial programs of content and specific pedagogy for teaching in junior secondary years," she said.
"Teacher education programs must include a major component that builds a deep understanding of the mathematics content that teachers will actually teach, alongside specific pedagogical knowledge for all main mathematics topics."
Professor Stacey said general knowledge about teaching is not sufficient because neither is studying higher mathematics.
"The Australian Curriculum describes mathematics as a discipline involving deep reasoning, inventive problem solving, and for modelling the real world, all built on a foundation of conceptual understanding and routine skills," she said.
"Teachers, schools and assessment authorities must encourage a better balance of all these components so students experience mathematics as challenging, creative and useful."
Evidence outpacing explicit teaching rollout
From Victoria to the Northern Territory, what was once left to professional judgement is fast becoming policy, with education leaders declaring the evidence supporting the wide-ranging benefits of explicit teaching are now too strong to argue with.
But one of the world’s leading authorities in literacy education pointed out that while explicit teaching has been gradually finding its way into Australian classrooms in recent years, this has mainly been in an ad hoc manner.
Professor Pamela Snow, Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Co-Director of SOLAR Lab at La Trobe University, bridges cognitive science and classroom practice, reshaping how reading is taught across Australia and internationally.
“It is only in the last two to three years that there have been more formal jurisdictional positions on this, and only one state [Victoria] has a mandate concerning the use of systematic synthetic phonics in the first three years of school,” Professor Snow told The Educator.
“There’s unfortunately wide variability in conceptualisations of explicit teaching and hence what this looks like in classrooms is also highly variable.”
Professor Snow said the reality is that we have no accurate data on what proportion of schools are using explicit teaching and what level of variability exists around this.
“It should also be noted that in the main [La Trobe University is an exception!], university faculties of education are still unhappy about the requirement that pre-service teachers learn about explicit teaching as part of their degrees, so this means some will be exposed to high-quality explicit teaching practice before they graduate but many will not,” she said.
“So-called student-led or project-based learning continues to be favoured by initial teacher education programs, so it should not surprise us that translation of evidence into practice will continue to be slow and uneven.”
Tech itself not the cause of lower scores
Professor Therese Keane is Associate Dean of Research and Industry Engagement at La Trobe University. An advocate for girls in STEM, her research covers digital technologies, educational robotics and computational thinking, underpinned by a doctorate in ICT leadership.
Professor Keane said AI and digital distractions may have contributed to weaker PISA results by reducing sustained attention and, in some cases, encouraging students to outsource the thinking required for learning.
However, she noted that the evidence does not show that technology itself is the cause.
“Not all screen time is equal, and not all technology use is a distraction,” Professor Keane told The Educator. “A student using a device to investigate a question, receive feedback, practise a skill or solve a problem is engaging very differently from a student using a personal phone for social media, messaging or gaming during a lesson.”
PISA found that moderate use of digital devices for learning was associated with stronger science performance, while leisure use at school beyond about one hour per day was associated with lower performance.
Around 28% of students reported that classmates were distracted by digital devices in most or every science lesson.
The report’s findings on AI are equally important, said Professor Keane.
“When students ask AI to summarise, draft or solve work without first doing the thinking themselves, this can become ‘cognitive offloading’,” she said. “That is, transferring the mental work to the machine instead of developing understanding.”
PISA found that students using AI for specific schoolwork tasks generally performed less well than non-users. However, students who used AI weekly to help them learn performed similarly to non-users, particularly when taught to question and verify AI-generated information.
“The strong performance of Singapore, Estonia and China [BSJZ] also shows that technology and achievement can coexist,” she said.
“The priority should be purposeful use, teacher guidance, critical AI literacy and ensuring students still do the thinking and problem-solving themselves.”