If education is the great equaliser, we are failing our kids

The latest results in the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment tests are good and bad news for Australia.

The good news is that after more than a decade of decline, the performance of our nation’s students has remained stable. The bad news: huge efforts to shift the needle have failed to improve performance.

PISA assesses 15-year-olds in science, reading and maths, with the last of these three domains the focus of this year’s study. The tests normally are conducted every three years but, because of Covid-19, this year’s are the first tests since 2018.

While we all want improvement, the stability of our results across the three domains is reassuring. Average scores across OECD countries have fallen significantly. Between 2018 and 2022, average performance across the OECD in maths fell by almost 15 points, a change three times greater than any previous one.

Many countries recorded declines worse than the average. Students in England lost the equivalent of about half a year of maths learning; in Germany and the US they lost more than a year. In both maths and reading, the performance of Dutch students fell by the equivalent of more than a year. Norway, Iceland and Finland recorded even greater declines.

That steadiness of the performance of Australian students speaks volumes for the hard work and professionalism of Australia’s school leaders and teachers during and after the pandemic. They worked long hours in highly challenging circumstances, and since schools reopened they have had to deal with teacher shortages and worrying increases in behaviour problems. Many school leaders tell me they have never seen the behaviour that has occurred in their schools since the lockdowns. School system leaders should also be recognised. It’s easy to forget that at the start of the pandemic we were not sure if – let alone how – our schools were going to keep running.

However, there is also bad news in the PISA results: stability means that our existing problems in performance and inequity remain. It is deeply worrying that the performance of Australian students in science is still roughly a year lower than it was in 2009. World Bank research shows this will, over time, adversely affect productivity and GDP growth.

Last year, the gap between students in the highest and lowest socio-economic status quartiles was equivalent to five years of schooling in mathematics. Further, only three in 10 Australian students in the lowest SES quartile attained the national proficient standard in mathematics, compared with 72 per cent in the highest quartile.

Disadvantaged students are also much less likely to reach high performance levels: students from the wealthiest 25 per cent of families are almost nine times likelier to perform highly in maths than students from the poorest 25 per cent of families.

Our school funding debates rightly emphasise equity problems, and we need a fairer, more equitable and efficient school funding model. The research shows that to reduce education inequity we need to target interventions at specific students and also provide a high-quality baseline of education to all students.

Australian education systems did well during the pandemic with what was usually a three-tiered support model. The top tier provides one-on-one intensive support for students falling furthest behind. The second tier provides small-group support for students who need some help to catch up. These targeted interventions reflect global research and best-practice.

Where I think we need improvement is in the bottom tier; the curriculum and instruction provided to all students.

The research highlights the need for a high-quality uniform baseline of curriculum and instruction to be provided to all students. A foundation of education equity is that all students – regardless of their background – have the right to a quality curriculum, quality instruction, and to attend a school that expects all its students to succeed.

To offer wealthy young people a different education from that offered to poor young people was seen not only as morally wrong but as exacerbating existing inequalities in our society.

Educators use the term curriculum entitlement: the right of all students, regardless of background, to be taught the knowledge and skills that enable them to succeed. Recent research shows that ensuring all students are taught a high-quality curriculum – a curriculum that has high standards, is content-rich, and is both rigorous and well-rounded – is one of the best ways to close the equity gap.

But across the past 10 to 15 years the dominant narrative in education is emphasised variation, driven by policies promoting autonomy, choice and individual agency. Both sides of the political spectrum have championed this narrative: the right generally pushes school autonomy and the benefits of school choice, while the left focuses on professional autonomy of teachers and of student agency.

This narrative has overwhelmed the earlier focus on a curriculum entitlement for all students. We struggle to talk about the need for consistency or reduced variation. The narrative of autonomy, choice and agency dominates.

A famous and highly influential 2018 US study, The Opportunity Myth, examined variation and its impact on disadvantaged students. It found that although many disadvantaged students had high aspirations, they were regularly given school work that was not at year-level standard, and were given higher grades than if they were being assessed at the year-level standard.

The curriculum taught to these students was embedding low performance; the curriculum entitlement of these students had been eroded to such a degree that their school failed to prepare them for further education or to successfully navigate and succeed in the modern society.

Many people in school education talk about these problems; variation in the curriculum taught within and across schools and inconsistent assessment are now more frequently discussed than they used to be. But we need more than a changed conversation. Learning First – the organisation I lead – is trying to do this work and has advocated for curriculum reform for many years.

Our report, Fixing the Hole in Australian Education: The Australian Curriculum Benchmarked against the Best, published last week, shows that the Australian science curriculum has about half the content in the first nine years of schooling of the average content of seven overseas systems that we benchmarked, including some of the world’s highest performers in PISA tests.

The lack of content in the Australian science curriculum means we are effectively saying it is OK for Australian students not to be taught that content. The curriculum entitlement of Australian students is much lower and the research shows that when this occurs, it is disadvantaged students who miss out most.

A high-quality Australian Curriculum would guarantee a curriculum entitlement for all Australian students. It would provide a quality foundation on which our school leaders and teachers can do their work.

Our national leaders need to focus on this but, for now, let’s not forget the main finding of this week’s PISA results. The pandemic produced dramatic declines in learning outcomes in many nations. But not in Australia. As we approach the end of the school year, teachers, school leaders and system leaders should be proud of their success, and the rest of us should be thankful.

Ben Jensen is chief executive of Learning First.

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