Op Ed – 2025 PISA

As published in The Australian on 9 September 2026.

As Education Minister I don’t normally condone copying someone else’s homework, but in this case I am going to make an exception.

Something big is happening in education in the UK. The OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment results were out on Tuesday. PISA is a worldwide study that measures the reading, maths and science skills of 15-year-olds every three years. Once again Singapore has hit it out of the park. So did South Korea, Japan and China. We didn’t move much. We placed 11th in reading, 11th in science and 17th in maths.

It’s the UK, though, that really got my attention. It has jumped three places in the world rankings for reading, four places for maths and seven places in science. That’s impressive and it’s hard-earned. This is not an overnight success story; in fact, it’s something almost 20 years in the making.

Back in 2006 England mandated phonics in schools; in 2012 it introduced a mandatory year 1 phonics screening check; and in 2014 it made important changes to the curriculum.

Tuesday’s results show the impact of all of this. Reform is hard and it takes time to shift the needle, but it’s not impossible. That’s what the agreements I have struck with every state and territory are all about. They finally fix the funding of our public schools. They mean an extra $20bn over the next 10 years, but they do more than that – they also tie that funding to reform. Part of that is phonics. The reading wars are over, we know what works. Phonics works.

In Australian schools that have been doing this for a while we can see the same thing that has happened in the UK, but we have to keep going and roll it out everywhere. As part of that, this year we rolled out a year 1 phonics check across the country, something the UK did 14 years ago.

It’s an important tool to identify kids who are behind and need extra help, and that includes small group tutoring. It also gives us a chance to see what the future might look like if we get it right. NSW has been doing the phonics check now for a few years and it shows what’s possible.

At Shelley Public School in Blacktown the number of year 1 kids on track with their reading has jumped from 33 to 70 per cent. At Briar Road Public School in Campbelltown it’s even bigger, up from 26 to 84 per cent.

The next step is maths. Maths is sequential and if you don’t understand the basics and the fundamentals then you get lost and you can’t catch up. That’s why we rolling out a year 1 numeracy check and we are also cracking open the curriculum and fixing it, starting with the first three years of maths.

That work is happening right now and when education ministers next meet we will have recommendations in front of us about the changes we should make to the maths curriculum.

At that meeting we will also make a decision about the next part of the curriculum we need to fix. This is the sort of stuff that should have happened a decade ago, but it’s happening now.

These sorts of reforms aren’t the finish line. They’re the starting gun. And it doesn’t end here.

The PISA data also tells us something else: the more you’re online, the more your results decline. Other tests show the same thing, that students who use screens a lot score lower than those who don’t – what’s sometimes called cognitive stunting. It makes sense. There is plenty of evidence that you absorb and retain information better if you write it down rather than type it.

The omnipresence of artificial intelligence makes grappling with all of this more urgent. I said I don’t condone copying someone else’s homework. AI industrialises this and makes it easier to cheat. But not just that; depending on how it is used it can undermine the foundations and the brain muscle we need to build when kids are young.

I am not making an argument against technology in schools. Students need to learn digital skills. That includes how to use, and how not to use, AI.

But I think there is a good argument that we need to wind it back a bit, a digital detox. That will also be on the agenda when education ministers next meet.