I wrote the first version of this in 2024, back when the doom was slightly quieter and nobody had yet stood at a podium to announce that the reading wars were over. Two years on, the catastrophe headlines have multiplied, the NAPLAN numbers have moved in genuinely mixed directions, and the overclaiming now comes from both ends of the pitch. So, consider this a revision: the evidence is refreshed, the argument is intact, and I’ve added the people who declared victory to the people crying collapse. Turns out they have more in common than either would like.
If you only read the headlines, you’d think Australian education was on the brink of collapse. The most recent round of NAPLAN coverage, from August 2026, gives you the flavour: reading and writing “going backwards,” “one in three students failing to meet benchmarks,” one outlet even reaching for “national tragedy.” Add the perennial stories about teacher shortages, curriculum reviews, and classroom behaviour, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the whole thing was in freefall.
It isn’t. I am not saying everything is fine, and I am not saying the literacy results are good, because they aren’t. What I am saying is that the catastrophe framing flattens a complicated, mixed picture into a single doom narrative, and in doing so it gets the story wrong. Zoom out from the headlines and you see something more interesting than collapse: a system genuinely struggling in some areas, quietly improving in others, and holding its own internationally while much of the developed world slides backwards.
Let’s look at the facts.
If you took the headlines at face value, you’d assume Australia was near the bottom of the OECD. We aren’t. PISA, run by the OECD, measures whether 15-year-olds can apply reading, maths and science to real problems. In the most recent cycle (PISA 2022, still the latest published results until PISA 2025 reports later in 2026), Australia scored 498 in reading, 507 in science and 487 in maths, above the OECD averages of 476, 485 and 472 respectively. On the international tables, we sit inside the top dozen countries across all three domains.
But be honest about what that ranking means, because a critic will be. Australia’s position rose sharply between 2018 and 2022, from 18th to around 10th in maths, even as our actual score dipped a few points. We didn’t climb. Other countries fell away during the pandemic, and ACER, which runs PISA here, said so plainly: our top-10 spot is largely a story about others declining, not us improving. So this is not a system in crisis by international standards, nor a triumph. We stemmed a long, slow decline and steadied ourselves while much of the OECD dropped. “Falling behind”? Behind whom, exactly?
Domestically, NAPLAN tests students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. First, a housekeeping note that matters: the old “national minimum standard” we all used to quote is gone. Since 2023, results are reported against four proficiency levels: Exceeding, Strong, Developing, and Needs additional support. Anyone still citing “90 per cent above the minimum standard” is quoting a measure that no longer exists.
Now the substance, and it cuts both ways. The literacy news is not good. Average reading scores went backwards in Years 5, 7 and 9 compared with 2025, and more students needed additional support in both reading and writing. The share of students at Strong or Exceeding in reading slipped to 66.3 per cent, down from 68.2 per cent the year before. That is a real decline and it deserves to be taken seriously.
But the “national tragedy” framing conveniently omits the other half of the ledger: numeracy is moving the other way. Since the 2023 reset, national numeracy has improved for Years 5, 7 and 9, reaching its highest average yet, with around 29,000 more students in the Exceeding band. Those gains showed up among Indigenous students too, with more Exceeding at Years 7 and 9 and average scores for Year 5 and 7 students at their highest level since the reset. When the result is “reading down, numeracy up, one cohort weaker in each” and the headline you get is “national tragedy,” the problem is not the data. It’s the framing.
There’s context the coverage skipped, too. Participation was down this year because of industrial action in Tasmania and flooding in the Northern Territory, to the point where ACARA didn’t report Tasmanian state-level results at all. A technical glitch on the first day disrupted the Year 5, 7 and 9 writing papers, which ACARA flagged with a caveat rather than adjusting the marks. None of that excuses the literacy slide, but it means a single year’s movement should be read with care, not treated as proof of collapse.
If the doom merchants oversell the bad news, the minister oversells the good. When the numeracy gains landed, Education Minister Jason Clare knew exactly what they meant. “The reading wars are over,” he announced. “We know what works.” The gains, he explained, were the fruit of explicit teaching, phonics and small-group tutoring, and in schools using them, “results are going up and up.”
The methods aren’t the problem, and I won’t pretend they are. Systematic phonics has real evidence behind it. Explicit instruction is a powerhouse for novices learning structured content. I have argued exactly that, at length (here and here) If your objection to Clare is “phonics doesn’t work,” you’ve lost the argument to the first literacy researcher who reads it.
The problem is the certainty. “The reading wars are over. We know what works.” That is not the language of evidence. It is the language of a man who has mistaken a correlation he likes for a mechanism he has proven. Ask the questions that certainty is built to skip, and the story falls apart.
Start with the timing. Almost every numeracy gain Clare celebrates is measured from 2023. That sounds like a neutral baseline until you remember what else changed that year: NAPLAN moved from May to March, and the proficiency scale was reset. Students now sit the test earlier in the year, with more instruction behind them, and the trend is measured off a reset baseline. How much of “up and up” is better teaching, and how much is a moved goalpost? Nobody can separate the two from this data. Clare doesn’t try, because certainty doesn’t do caveats.
Then there’s the contradiction sitting in his own press release. If explicit teaching and phonics are why numeracy is climbing, why is reading going backwards in the same results, the same schools, the same reforms, the same year? His answer is that the reading decline shows why we need more of the methods that were already being rolled out while reading declined. So, the reforms are the cause of the good news and the cure for the bad news at once, and we’re asked not to notice that one explanation cannot do both jobs without accounting for why it only worked on one subject.
And the evidence for the grand causal claim? One school. Highvale Primary in Victoria, up 25 percentage points in Year 3 reading. Lovely for Highvale. It is also exactly the single-cohort, single-school swing you’d expect to find somewhere across nine and a half thousand campuses no matter what policy was in force. A national causal claim built on one hand-picked school isn’t evidence. It’s an anecdote wearing a lanyard. Meanwhile,.the $20 billion Clare ties the results to is spread over ten years and mostly unspent. Funding that hasn’t arrived cannot have caused results that already have.
The catastrophisers and the triumphalists have the same disease. Both are certain, and both are using the same numbers to be certain about opposite things. The doom merchants take the reading decline and pronounce the system broken. The minister takes the numeracy gain and pronounces it fixed. Both skip the unglamorous middle where the truth lives: a large, complex system moved a little in a few directions this year, and honest people cannot yet tell you exactly why. The most radical thing anyone could say about the 2026 results is not “tragedy” and not “the war is over.” It’s “we don’t fully know yet, and here’s what we’d need to find out.” Nobody gets a press conference for that. Which is precisely why it’s worth saying.
Once you see the move, you see it everywhere. Teacher shortages? Real, but global and pandemic-driven, not a uniquely Australian collapse, and some academics argue the relentless doom coverage is itself feeding the shortage by framing the job as a losing battle. Talented people don’t rush toward a profession the whole country has agreed to call a disaster. Curriculum reviews? Usually a system doing maintenance, not proof it’s broken. Classroom behaviour? A perennial challenge everywhere, catnip for sensational coverage, and quietly being addressed by schools running positive behaviour programs that rarely make the news.
That’s the real distortion. News runs on crisis, and a steady diet of it warps public perception until a mixed result reads as a collapse. For every grim headline there are stories that never run: students placing in international STEM competitions, schools piloting genuinely clever teaching, teachers going well beyond the job description, and this year, tens of thousands more kids hitting the top numeracy band. None of it makes the front page, because “Australia’s Students Are Falling Behind” will always out-click “Australia’s Students Making Slow, Uneven, Occasionally Encouraging Progress.”
Fear sells. It always has. But we owe the students and teachers in the system facts rather than fear, and the facts tell a more textured story than either the headlines or the press releases allow: internationally steady while others slide, numeracy improving, literacy genuinely under pressure and needing real work, and a system that keeps adjusting rather than collapsing. Nobody in this argument gets to be certain. Not the papers, not the minister, not me.
Could it be better? Obviously. The reading results alone should keep us honest. But “we have real work to do on literacy” is a very different claim from “the system is failing our kids,” and only one of them is true. So next time a headline announces the end of Australian education as we know it, or a minister announces he’s fixed it, dig a little deeper before you believe either. The picture underneath is messier, fairer, and a good deal more honest than the people selling you certainty would like.
And that’s the story worth telling. The sky isn’t falling. In fact, it’s full of potential.
