Australian education in long-term decline due to poor curriculum, report says

Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/Alamy

A complete overhaul of Australia’s curriculum is needed to reverse a long-term decline in international education test results, a new report suggests.

The findings, released by education research and consulting group Learning First on Monday, benchmarked Australia’s science curriculum against seven comparable education systems: England, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the US and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Quebec.

The report found Australian students were learning 44 science topics in their first nine years of schooling compared with an average of 74.

It also found the process through which the science curriculum was developed was “broken” and not based on leading research or quality benchmarking.

Australia’s curriculum also lacked the depth of learning – with five topics covered in depth compared with an average of 22 across the same timeframe.

The CEO of Learning First, Ben Jensen, said Australia had stagnated or declined across all subjects in international test results for more than a decade and measures to reverse these trends had failed.

“Whenever results come out showing the decline in Australian education we point the finger at teachers and raise issues around quality, but it’s the national curriculum that’s the problem,” Jensen said.

“What our data shows is there are massive holes – it’s since the Australian curriculum was introduced that international scores have been falling.

“All the research says the quality of the curriculum taught has a significant impact on learning, performance and equity.”

The report also found consistent poor sequencing of content, whereby topics weren’t taught until much later in schooling, which research showed was a vital measure for effective teaching and learning.

Evolution wasn’t taught until year 10 in the Australian curriculum, compared with years five and six in Quebec and year six in England.

Australia’s national curriculum, introduced by the former Labor government in 2010, was hailed as a new “back to basics, world-class” system.

It was developed by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), providing the foundation of state and territory education systems, including achievement standards, content descriptions and teaching guides.

But since its introduction, student performance in international science assessments is now one full year below where it was, with results also falling in reading and maths.

In the latest results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), released in 2019, Australian students’ performance in mathematics fell to the OECD average, the first time results in one of the three core competencies has done so since international comparisons began in 2000.

The results confirmed a continuing long-term decline in Australian students’ reading, mathematics and science skills, with 10 countries now with “significantly higher” results in reading than Australia, 23 in maths and 12 in science.

The OECD’s Pisa is held every three years and tests 15-year-old students on their performance in maths, science and reading.

Compared with students in the highest performing country, Singapore, Australians were more than a year behind in reading, about three years behind in mathematics and almost two years behind in science.

Jensen said Australia set a low standard for what students should learn.

He said rather than teacher development programs, a complete overhaul of the curriculum was needed and pointed to New South Wales, which recently released a draft of its new Year 7-to-10 curriculum.

The draft has just over 50% more science content than the existing version.

“We see this as a giant failure of process,” Jensen said.

“We can find no evidence the process to develop any of the other subjects were better.

“It should be based on the best research and what’s working in classrooms.”

A spokesperson for ACARA said the current curriculum, version 2.0, was “world class” and identified the essential content all Australian children should learn, including in science.

They said the science curriculum was formally endorsed by all nine education ministers in April 2022. The curriculum is subject to a six-year cycle of review.

“This followed a significant review that reflected feedback from subject, curriculum and teacher experts from all states and territories, as well as public consultation,” they said.

“The review process also included international benchmarking with high-achieving counterparts such as Singapore, which found the Australian curriculum was on par with these curricula in terms of overall breadth, depth, and rigour.”