Teacher-Librarian Positions Continue to Be Cut as Australia's PISA Reading Scores Drop a Cumulative 37 Points

The Newcastle-Maitland Catholic Diocese announced last week that it would cut or redeploy teacher-librarian positions at 58 schools. Within one week, a petition launched by Kate Temple, author of the "Bin Chicken" series, gathered more than 13,000 signatures demanding that teacher-librarians be classified as statutory school positions. Endorsed by Australia Reads, the Australian Library and Information Association, and the School Library Coalition, the petition will be submitted to state and federal education departments.

The numbers behind the petition are harder to avoid. According to ABC News, the latest PISA report released this week by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that between 2022 and 2025, the proportion of Australian students reaching the "national proficiency standard" dropped by two percentage points, with the proportion of low performers rising correspondingly by two percentage points. Since 2000, the average reading score of Australian 15-year-olds has fallen a cumulative 37 points, with 7 points lost in just the past three years, slipping to 491.

That score is higher than the OECD average of 461, roughly on par with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, but lower than New Zealand, Ireland, and Japan, and markedly lower than the leaders Singapore (535 points) and the Chinese Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang consortium (527 points). In Singapore, high-performing readers account for 22% and low performers only 14%; the corresponding figures for Australia are 11% and 23%.

ABC News, citing data released last year by Australia Reads, noted that roughly one-third of Australian children cannot read proficiently and that 29% of young people do not read at all for pleasure. The organisation attributes the slide to a lack of reading role models, digital media shortening attention spans, an over-emphasis on skills training, and limited access to books and texts.

Speaking to 891 ABC Adelaide, Temple said the news of teacher-librarian position cuts had acted as a "lightning rod," causing a problem widespread across Australia to erupt in one place. "Teacher-librarians are essential to building a reading culture in schools," she said. "They also take on very important teaching tasks such as digital literacy and media literacy. But as an author who frequently walks into schools, what I see even more is their real value in cultivating a love of reading—which is exactly the key to countering our decline in reading ability."

Temple pointed out that teacher-librarians serve both "ambitious readers looking for the next book on their reading journey" and neurodiverse children with reading difficulties. "Teacher-librarians know their student cohort extremely well, and they can truly bring the whole student body into a community that loves reading," she said. "Schools with adequate librarian staffing, regardless of type, have outstanding reading cultures."

The structural retreat is not new. Hajnalka Molloy, chair of the South Australian School Library Association, revealed that before 2011, teacher-librarians in that state were funded statutory positions; the model was then changed to a "student-centred funding model," handing decision-making power to principals operating under tight budgets. Currently, fewer than 15% of schools in the state still employ teacher-librarians who hold both teaching and library-information qualifications.

"We are paid the same as other teachers, but we bring additional professional skills, deep knowledge of children's literature, connections with Australia's outstanding children's literature community, and we help every child find a book they will love and that suits them," Molloy told 891 ABC Adelaide.

She also noted that principals "often do not fully appreciate the impact of dual-qualified teacher-librarians on student learning outcomes, particularly in information literacy, reading culture, and student wellbeing." With artificial intelligence now widely introduced into teaching, she believes the role is "more important than ever"—she is teaching primary school students to maintain a critical attitude toward the reliability of AI search results, helping them identify credible information, recognise bias, misinformation, and disinformation, and use AI tools ethically.

Other supporters of the petition include Matt Cosgrove, author of the "Macca the Alpaca" series, Andy Griffiths, and Terry Denton. However, whether a petition bearing 13,000 signatures can shift state or federal policy remains an open question. The causal link between teacher-librarian position cuts and the decline in student reading has also not been directly established.

But one measurable trend is very clear: across the more than ten years during which Australian school librarian positions have been progressively eliminated, PISA reading scores have dropped a cumulative 37 points.