Speaking on Wednesday at an ACER event dedicated to unpacking Australia’s results in the international assessment, the prominent researcher from The University of Melbourne said the surge of media coverage that speaks to our ‘plunging’ national results, and commentary that suggests our education system is in a state of disaster, have got it wrong.
Rather, Australia’s 2025 data should be cause for both celebration and ‘serious investigation’, Hattie proposed.
“The headline that should have been in every newspaper this morning is ‘Australia is in the top 10 in the world. Congratulations.
“…That is pretty incredible,” he told his Melbourne audience.
In any other industry, achieving this kind of ranking would garner praise and support – but not in education, he quipped.
“Those industries (like business) get applause. They get support. Are they all perfect? No. But because we have some imperfections, we’re seen as a failing system.”
The release of the latest results has triggered yet another predictable response from policymakers and education stakeholders, Hattie said, with multiple interest groups hastening to seek out a particular data point, graph or table to “support the reform they’ve already decided on”.
“Here we go again, another round of PISA, another burst of headlines, and another week where Australian education is told how bad it is … a familiar cast will assemble: the wailers ... the demonising demons who talk about the quality of Australian education as failing – I’m talking policy people who once again start educational tours to go to Shanghai, Singapore and Finland.
“But then as you’ve noticed, we can take Finland off the agenda now…” Hattie said wryly.
The answer to turning around Australia’s long-term decline in academic performance is not something to be found by looking at what the very top performing countries are doing, the researcher added.
Rather, Hattie said our best bet is to find a way to scale up best practice from within.
“We’re in the top ten. Teachers, thank you. We need to scale up the excellence all around us. And in the work I do [with Visible Learning] where we work at about 5000 schools a year, I have never been to a school in my time, ever, where there isn’t a group of excellent teachers [who are having an] incredibly high impact on kids.
“Our message is very simple. We want [our school leaders] to identify those teachers, form a coalition of success, and then invite the others to join them.”
A lack of courage to do just this is our school system’s biggest downfall, Hattie said.
“When you say quality teaching is defined by … the impact they have, it’s not difficult to identify them. Kids know that. Sometimes the parents know that. And every teacher in the school knows [the attributes of these excellent teachers], but we hide it.”
This reform agenda should not be about naming and blaming those who are having a lesser impact on student learning, but “receiving and showing excellence for those that do, and inviting the others to join them”, Hattie explained.
Another curriculum change is certainly not the answer either, the expert said.
“When I look at some of those countries that stay the same (in their rankings), and those that went up … their policies were dramatically all over the place.
“Some of them had very tight, rich curriculum, some have more inquiry curriculum. There’s no reciprocal relationship…. Yet, as it’s been pointed out many times by the OECD, you narrow the curriculum so you can go deeper, so you start to have more effect.
“But I’m terrified that that’s going to lead us to having another curriculum change, which won’t change the lives of any kids much at all, but will [make teachers’ jobs more difficult].
This week Education Minister Jason Clare declared that the Australian curriculum has to be fixed, pointing to reforms made in the UK as the template to follow.
“The Poms did this over a decade ago, and their results went up yesterday, not down,” Clare said during an appearance on Sunrise.
“We’re starting with maths because maths is sequential, and we’re starting with the first three years of maths ...in a couple of weeks, we’ll get advice on the changes we need to make to the maths curriculum for those little kids.
“And then we’ll make a decision in a couple of weeks about the next chunk of the curriculum that we need to fix.”
According to Professor Hattie, AI bans in schools are not the way to address our declining national results. PHOTO: ACER
Between 2022 and 2025 in both reading and maths, Australian students’ performance declined, fewer students attained the national proficient standard, and there was an increase in the number of low performers.
This is a problem that needs interrogation, Hattie said.
“[This finding] should point out that remediation isn’t the only answer. We’ve got to worry also about why those top students are not being challenged, do not enjoy the challenge while working at that top level and how [more students can] reach that high level.
“So I’d be asking for more challenge, for more depth and more progress [there].”
Australia is not as good at teaching above average children as we might think, he flagged.
“If we cut it up, we come out at the top five in the world if we looked at how good we were at teaching kids (who are) below average.”
Experts in the field of gifted education have warned for years of the continued systemic neglect of Australia’s high potential and gifted students.
The 2025 results paint a picture of significant global decline since the international testing first started in 2000.
Clare, among others, has pointed the finger at technology and called for an impending ‘digital detox’ in classrooms.
“[All the countries involved in PISA] are seeing the same trend. What’s the common factor here? … If you have a look at this report that came out yesterday, it says that the more kids are on screens at school, the more likely they are to fall behind.
“That the more time they spend in front of a laptop or a tablet, the lower their results are.
“And so I think that tells us that we need a digital detox in our schools.”
Education expert Daisy Christodoulou, Director of Education at No More Marking, believes technology is ‘part of the story’ when it comes to the waning performance seen across the OECD.
“…For a few decades now, researchers have been speculating that the “reverse Flynn effect” (basically falling IQ scores) is the result of technology reducing cognitive effort. I think there is a lot of truth to that…” she posted on X.
Meanwhile, Clare highlighted action being taken in US primary schools on this front.
“New York has just announced that they’re going to ban AI from primary schools. The Trump Administration has just said to schools across the nation that they need to use tech in schools for a purpose. Not all the time…
“So, this is coming, and I’m going to put this on the agenda when education ministers meet in a couple of weeks’ time here because I think the evidence is in; we need a digital detox in our schools.”
Yet according to Hattie, AI bans in schools are certainly not the way to go.
“The unrestricted, recreational and passive use of technology is an issue in our system and it has crept into our schooling system,” he clarified.
“And my plea is, particularly with AI – as we’ve just got a much faster trajectory in terms of its infusion in our society and in schools than computers have ever had – is we better move fast to identify the skills we need to teach students to use that technology...
“As we sit around and ban it, and minimise its usage, and not teach those skills, we’re not doing any services, and surely those skills are the essence of reading and maths and science as well.
“So, I think technology is one that we need to take on as a challenge, rather than what’s happening in the world, particularly in the United States now…”
Addressing inequality and disadvantage is alone not enough to shift our long-term decline either, Hattie said.
“Inequality is profound … [we have an] educational gulf. Disadvantage is an urgent problem. But addressing this disadvantage alone won’t change the national trend...
“We can look at gender. We can look at geography. We can look at language. We can look at other background variables that reveal important inequalities, but none provide a sufficient national explanation.”
The fact remains that Australian education knows ”very little about how to scale up success in our business”, Hattie concluded.
“I think I’m pretty good at researching literature. When I asked how many studies can I find to ever address the issue of scaling up excellence in education, I’m up to 10. In any other business that’s core: how do you scale up success?
“How many evidence-based implementation models do we have in education? Very few. There are lots of them in other businesses...”
And yet the overly negative PISA narrative dominating headlines does our teachers and school leaders a huge disservice, Hattie reiterated.
“Go out and congratulate the teachers and your school leaders. Spend time saying, ‘hey, we are amongst the elite’. Do we have problems? Yes. But let’s start with that.”
