Calling out what some see as curriculum shortcomings and patchy instructional approaches that fail to set all children up with the foundational maths skills they need to succeed, commentators such as research fellow Trisha Jha from The Centre for Independent Studies have urged state and territory education departments to look more closely at what is happening inside those schools that are bucking the downward trend.

These effective practices need to be implemented at scale, Jha says.

“The Year 3 numeracy results are a concern. We do see a higher proportion in those bottom two (proficiency) bands than before, and that’s not an insignificant shift as well,” Jha, a former secondary teacher, tells EducationHQ.

“It’s really hard to know exactly what’s going on, and especially when you have different states and territories adopting different policies and … they are at different levels of progress with implementing those and making sure they actually trickle down to the classroom level.”

Year 3 students recorded the lowest average numeracy score since 2023. Some 11 per cent of this cohort were found to be in need of additional support, sitting below the basic proficiency level expected for their age.

Across all tested year levels, 67 per cent of students on average achieved at ‘Exceeding’ and ‘Strong’ levels in numeracy (compared to 66.8 per cent in 2025), increasing from Year 3 (62.1 per cent) to Year 5 (70.7 per cent), remaining relatively stable in Year 7 (69.9 per cent) and then dropping in Year 9 (65.3 per cent).

ACARA CEO Stephen Gniel said the drop in Year 3 numeracy was “clearly concerning” but noted education ministers were making moves to address this, including the rollout of the Year 1 numeracy check.  

Jha flags a complicating factor here.

“States have full autonomy over which numeracy check they implement, which means that some of those checks may not necessarily be measuring the same thing.”

She says this could lead to a great degree of variation in the decisions teachers make on the basis of the data they collect.

“I think means that you’re not necessarily going to be able to see clearly what approaches are working and what aren’t, because it will just get a bit too noisy.”

Gniel maintains that ACARA is also “playing its part” by reviewing the Foundation to Year 2 Mathematics curriculum to “ensure our youngest learners get the strong grounding in mathematics and numeracy they need to succeed in their education and later in life”.

Yet Jha argues the curriculum reform appears to be happening largely behind closed doors, making it tricky to know if it is moving in a direction that will help to actually move the dial on Year 3 numeracy results – or whether it will ultimately work in the opposite way.  

“I have some concerns, for instance, about comments that [Gniel] made about financial literacy, where he’s sort of implied in … very vague comments that financial literacy might be more of a focus to the F-2 curriculum review – and it really depends on what that means,” she says.

“I would be concerned that with any more attention to financial literacy than was already in the curriculum… you risk detracting attention from the important fluency and memorisation required of the maths facts and (things like) number relations in the early years.”

The current F-2 maths curriculum does not dedicate enough focus to building students’ mathematical fluency, Jha says.

“And it probably doesn’t include enough guidance to teachers about how to develop the fluency with the maths facts [with] young students, and I would think that that’s a far more productive direction for the F-2 curriculum to go in.”

Speaking today on the Year 3 maths results, Education Minister Jason Clare said “we’ve got to fix the curriculum to make it simpler and easier to teach,” reporting that many teachers and principals have said it is too difficult to implement in the early years.

La Trobe University Associate Professor Monteleone also weighed in on the Year 3 data dip, saying early identification of any learning gaps is just the start.

“…once we know which students require additional support, the response needs to be high-quality, explicit instruction, with clear, direct modelling and staying with those mathematical skills until students have reached accuracy.

“Once accuracy is secure, the next step is building fluency with repeated, structured practice so that skill becomes automatic.

“This sequence matters because we want students to be able to apply their mathematical understandings quickly and flexibly to problems like those presented in NAPLAN.”

As in previous years, boys generally outperformed girls in numeracy, with significantly fewer girls achieving at the ‘exceeding’ level.

According to Monteleone, this gender gap is “telling us a story that we need to consider as a nation”.

“By Year 9, boys are substantially exceeding girls in numeracy. That gap matters beyond NAPLAN, because students will use the data to determine whether they choose STEM subjects in secondary school and beyond,” she says.

“We want more girls choosing STEM and we need to ensure that the instruction in primary and secondary schools includes well taught foundational mathematics that benefit all students fairly.” 

Overall, this year’s NAPLAN remained broadly stable at a national level, with no notable changes in average scores between 2026 and 2025, or between 2026 and 2023.

Around two-in-three students achieved at the ‘Strong’ or ‘Exceeding’ proficiency level in reading, numeracy and writing, with one in 10 students needing additional support across all year groups and testing domains. 

Jha says there are three main policy ingredients that need to align if we want to see improvement at scale from here.

“If we were to boil it down to three things, it’s the knowledge-rich curriculum, which needs to be explicitly taught, and in classrooms that are calm and focused on learning.

“And evidence suggests that schools that are able to do those three things well are able to improve their outcomes.”