Australian Students Fall Back Two Years; the Federal Government Cannot Use Reform Commitments as Report Cards

The Australian federal government cannot use rankings that remain above the OECD average and reforms under way to mask the continuing decline in students' mathematics and reading abilities. The 2025 PISA results show that Australian reading and mathematics scores have fallen to their lowest points since testing began: reading levels are roughly two school years behind those of 2000, mathematics is more than two years behind 2003, and science is nearly a year behind 2006. A wealthy country allowing a generation of students to keep losing ground in foundational competencies is a failure of education governance, not a fluctuation that a few relative rankings can soften.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare used the results to demonstrate the importance of teaching reform and increased public school funding, citing two decades of British reform and that country's ranking improvement in this round as a reference. The problem is that foreign experience can only show that long-term policies may produce effects; it cannot prove that the measures Australia is implementing have already worked. Facing record-low scores, the government is still presenting first the direction of reform, rather than learning improvements already achieved by Australian students. This response packages untested policy commitments in advance as answers, weakening the government's responsibility for existing results.

The specific cost falls on ordinary students. The number of high-performing Australian students has decreased while the number of low-performing students has increased; 21% of surveyed students said they could not learn well in most or all science classes, and 41% said classrooms suffered noise and disorder, both worse than the OECD average. Another 44% of students said they had skipped school for a day in the two weeks before the test, nearly double the OECD average proportion. The government can discuss classroom discipline, teaching methods and screen time, but these issues cannot be treated as moral failings of individual students or teachers; whether schools have sufficient resources, stable teaching order and effective support is, in the first instance, a public service that those holding the policy and fiscal levers must deliver.

Australia achieved above-OECD-average results in digital learning programmes, and its science performance also recovered slightly compared with 2022. These positive results have not changed the core judgment: reading and mathematics are foundational competencies for entry into higher education, employment and public life, and a long-term decline will further translate differences in family resources into differences in life opportunities. Wealthy families can purchase tutoring and additional support, while families dependent on public education can only bear the consequences of institutional failure.

This article is based on ABC Australia's September 8, 2026 reporting on the PISA results; that reporting did not provide the implementation timeline, allocation details or disaggregated data for different social groups of the funding reform.

The federal government should accept a simple but stringent standard: reform is not what has been announced, but what students have learned. With reading and mathematics having fallen back roughly two school years, placing British rankings, digital skills advantages or future measures at the forefront only obscures the scale of the failure. The government holds the power to set policy and invest public funds, and must also bear primary political responsibility for failing over the long term to reverse the decline in foundational learning ability.