Australian school students two years behind world's best performing systems

In Australia on average, the first-generation children of migrants performed significantly better than both Australian-born and foreign-born students.

The PISA 2015 test was completed between August and September last year by a representative sample of 14,500 Australian students from 750 schools. Globally 550,000 students took part. It is conducted every three years, administered by ACER and funded by the Australian government.

Political reaction

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham, who is due to sit down to work out a deal on school funding with state education ministers next week, said: "We must acknowledge the reality that our performance is slipping. Given the wealth of our nation and scale of our investment, we should expect to be a clear education leader, not risk becoming a laggard.

"Commonwealth funding for schools has increased by 50 per cent since 2003 while our results are going backwards. I'm not suggesting that money is not important, of course it is vital, but ... Australia ranks as spending the fifth highest amount on education in the OECD and once you get to that level there is little value in just increasing spending."

The Gonski model of needs-based funding was designed to lift overall student achievement by applying additional loadings to students from remote schools, Indigenous and low socio-economic backgrounds or with a disability.

Federal Education minister Simon Birmingham. Photo: Wayne Taylor

But agreement between policy-makers over how to fund schools after 2017 has broken down, with the federal government refusing to fund its Labor predecessor's commitment to the "full Gonski", while flagging it will make schools funding contingent on the states implementing measures to lift teacher quality and student performance.

NSW Education minister Adrian Piccoli, who has clashed with his federal colleague on the funding issue, said: "The 2015 PISA results show that Australia, like many other countries, faces challenges to improve student learning outcomes.

"In NSW, we have introduced significant reforms to lift the entry standard for new teachers, improve teacher quality in every classroom and establish minimum literacy and numeracy standards for HSC students."

Federal Opposition education spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek said: "These results show exactly why Labor introduced needs-based school funding.

"Given we know Australia's school performance is falling behind, we know disadvantaged kids continue to struggle, and we know that extra needs-based funding is starting to fix that - it's extraordinary that the Liberals are cutting $30 billion from schools, and have torn up reforms designed to improve school performance."

Federal Labor Education Shadow minister Tanya Plibersek Photo: Wayne Taylor

Jennifer Buckingham from the Centre for Independent Studies pointed out that Finland - often lauded for its education system - had declined over the past two PISA cycles.

"The PISA results confirm that Australia's education system has some serious deficiencies and that the wrong approach has been taken if the goal has been to improve student outcomes," she said.

"The growth in the proportion of students in the low performing group and the reduction in the proportion of students in the high performing group are of particular concern."