The nation’s classrooms have been ranked as among the most disruptive in the world in the latest international report card on Australian schools, with a third of all students saying they do not listen to the teacher in most lessons.
More than 40 per cent of the 13,437 Australian students surveyed as part of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) said there was “noise and disorder” in their mathematics classes all or most of the time.
Almost a third said the teacher had to wait a long time for students to quiet down, with 9.4 per cent saying it occurred in every single lesson, and 20.3 per cent in most classes.
Australia ranked 71 out of 81 nations surveyed when it came to classroom discipline. The position at the bottom of the table mirrors similar findings when the tests were last conducted.
Japan had the most ordered classrooms in the world, followed by Korea, while the United States was ranked 15th and the United Kingdom 28th.
Australia’s classrooms were less disruptive than nine other nations surveyed, including Chile, Bulgaria, New Zealand and Brazil.
The responses of 690,000 students to seven statements were used to create the international index.
Greg Ashman, a deputy principal of a Victorian school and author of several books on teaching, said there was a reluctance in Australia to recognise classroom disruption as a problem.
“It is due to a general malaise; it is two things: the general scepticism of authority across society, and the particular ideological view of education, which has a romantic view of childhood and [is] squeamish about doing what’s necessary to have safe and orderly classrooms,” Ashman said.
“Kids who have ADHD or are on the autism spectrum benefit from having clear routines – this is best practice but it is looked down [on] as not creative enough. They think kids should be following their own passions and inquiry. The idea of a routine is anathema to the ideology of a lot of stakeholders in education.”
Australia is among the worst in the world when it comes to classroom discipline.Credit: iStock
Finland, which education experts around the world held up as a paragon of schooling in the 2000s thanks to its stellar PISA results, has since tumbled in international rankings. Classrooms in that country are almost as disruptive as Australia, with a ranking of 68 in the index.
Finnish educator and education policy Professor Pasi Sahlberg said the decline was partly due to educators being slow to ban mobile phones.
“Finland, like Australia, is very technologically advanced, every student has a smartphone and this starts in primary schools,” he said.
A new government in Finland this year pledged to amend the law to ban phones in schools, but Sahlberg said other factors had contributed to its decline.
“From 2013, the public sector budget started to shrink. The worst cut was the classroom assistants for kids with special needs or behavioural issues. There was an increase in class sizes and teachers just couldn’t find a way to make things work,” he said.
Additionally, Sahlberg said education ideas such as open-plan classrooms had been poorly implemented in some Finnish schools, which had contributed to declining discipline.
“Another is the idea that very young people can regulate their own behaviour, leaving kids alone to decide what they do. The use of devices is an example of this.”
On average, students in countries surveyed were less likely to report getting distracted using digital devices when the use of cell phones on school premises is banned.
When it came to bullying, Australia ranked 75 out of 80 countries in 2022. It found 24 per cent of girls and 26 per cent of boys reported being the victim of bullying acts at least a few times a month. The average across countries surveyed was 20 per cent for girls and 21 per cent for boys.
PISA said in education systems where performance remained high, students tended to feel safer and less exposed to bullying and other risks at their school.
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