The research from the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University shows ‘clear, consistent and growing’ gaps between the haves and have-nots – gaps that only widen as students progress through school.
“In Australia, disadvantaged students can be years behind the Australian average across year levels, whilst advantaged students can be years ahead,” the study flags.
Researchers compared students’ performance according to their parents’ level of education and their occupation.
Between 2008 and 2025, children from high SES backgrounds consistently performed better on the standardised test than those from low socioeconomic backgrounds across all year levels.
“These socioeconomic learning gaps start in Year 3 and grow as students progress through Years 5 and 7, so the largest learning gaps are found among Year 9 students,” the researchers note in a report.
The learning gaps were generally larger for reading than for numeracy.
In Year 3, the average reading gap over the 14-year period between advantaged and disadvantaged students was two years and three months, which by Year 9 had increased to four years and three months.
The learning gaps were found to worsen over time. In 2008, the reading gap between Year 3 students whose parents had a degree and those whose parents did not finish school was one year and eight months.
By 2022, it was two years and seven months.
This was not due to learning gains among advantaged students, but because disadvantaged students were falling further behind at an increasing pace, the study found.
The revised NAPLAN testing that started in 2023 also confirms significant gaps in reading according to parental education and occupation, which are particularly large in Years 7 and 9, reaching 4 years and 8 months, and 5 years and 10 months in 2025, respectively.
The problem is a structural one, lead author Dr Andres Molina said, given the enduring and persistent nature of the gaps.
“It’s clear Australia is not tracking well in helping schools meet the needs of disadvantaged students, or in reaching its overarching goals of equity and excellence,” Molina said.
“…Educational inequality in Australia is driven by policies at the system level, and it is at the system level that we see opportunities for real change.”
Researchers reiterate that the findings do not suggest that individual teachers or schools are failing, but rather that factors at the system level are exacerbating inequality in learning outcomes over time.
And yet policy initiatives and measures to address the country’s educational inequity to date have often neglected the systemic drivers of the issue and instead focused on schools and students themselves, the researchers argued.
“The implication is that schools and teachers working in disadvantaged settings are expected to fix what the system creates, while being dealt a more difficult hand that restricts their capacity to meet student needs and improve outcomes,” they note.
The current approach falls well short of the challenge, they maintain.
Five key recommendations are proposed to tackle the problem:
- Governments need to urgently re-frame the problem away from schools and teaching practice and address the socioeconomic factors that impact learning at the school level, as well as the systemic structures that sustain it.
- Funding models must address the ‘double disadvantage’ some students face. Many children start school with additional needs stemming from socioeconomic, linguistic or cultural factors. A more explicit policy focus on funding those schools operating on the front line of the residualisation battle could help break cycles of disadvantage.
- Governments need to ensure that all schools, starting with local public schools, become a great choice for families to ensure their child’s future opportunities. This includes re-thinking how tertiary admission structures such as the ATAR now shape choice and opportunity in secondary education.
- Full-service school models should be encouraged to help disadvantaged students, schools and communities.
- More must be done to address emerging inequality in the early years, given socioeconomic learning gaps can appear as early as preschool. More needs to be done to re-balance funding in the early years in line with children’s needs. Community hub models that offer wraparound services in high need communities show promise.
The study comes following a scathing new essay by Jane Caro, Walkley-winning columnist, author and social commentator, who has spelled out in frank terms how we’ve ended up with one of the most inequitable schooling systems in the OECD – and one that she warned is fast approaching breaking point.
“I think that we have almost deliberately hobbled social mobility,” Caro told EducationHQ.
“…over the last 25 years, Australia's made quite a lot of progress in terms of women's rights and in terms of combating racism, even perhaps ableism - but we still have no progress in terms of wealth and power and social class.”
While most countries use their educational funding to at least mitigate the effects of social class, here we “use it to make it a whole lot worse”, Caro argued.
“We Australians like to disown the idea that we have a class system, but we have, and we really build and maintain it via our education system.
“We've basically maintained the idea that people who are born into poorer families should stick to their class.
“You know, they should remain poorer. We're going to put them in poorer schools. We're going to give them less chances than we give to children who were luckier in the lottery of birth.”
