Standard drops off for top students

ANALYSIS of a decade of student tests provides compelling evidence of a fall in achievement in Australia.

A COMPREHENSIVE analysis of a decade of international and national student tests provides compelling evidence of a fall in achievement in Australia, particularly among the top students, and a growing gap in the scores among students at the richest and poorest schools.

The review by the Australian Council for Educational Research says the only improvement in Australian students' results is in reading in the early primary years, in the national literacy and numeracy tests for Year 3, which was most obvious in states that had introduced prep years or preschool.

But this improvement among Year 3 students was countered by the performance of Year 4 students in an international test, in which Australia had the lowest scores of the English-speaking nations.

Reading levels among 15-year-olds declined overall.

ACER principal research fellow John Ainley, who wrote the report, said the discrepancy in the primary school results suggested the minimum standards set in the national reading tests were too low.

Dr Ainley said there had been no parallel improvement in numeracy in the early primary years, suggesting recent policies focusing on early literacy and the first years of schools were making a difference. "It's been a fairly consistent effort in the early years over 10 years and I think the results say you can make a difference by systematic policy change," he said.

The report, Measure for Measure, draws on major sources of test data that enable national comparisons over time to draw a more comprehensive picture of student achievement, rather than the one-off snapshots from individual tests.

It says the steady improvement in Year 3 reading between 2008 and 2012, and a smaller, less steady increase in Year 5 scores, "give some cause for optimism in terms of the efforts that have been applied to the years of schooling and to the years before school".

In that time, Queensland and Western Australia have introduced an extra, prep year of school before Year 1, in line with other states, and the federal Labor government funded universal preschool for children the year before they start school.

Dr Ainley said the decline in performance among 15-year-olds had occurred at a time when the national education debate had become focused on minimum standards through a testing regime extending back to the 1990s, which might have encouraged a concentration on getting students to the minimum level and insufficient attention to the performance at the top end.

In addition, schools had tended to educate children from similar backgrounds rather than more disparate families and abilities as in the past.

Dr Ainley said the result was a concentration of disadvantage in schools, which international research showed led to lower levels of performance.

This also contributed to the growing gap in performance between schools in low socioeconomic areas and schools in affluent areas.