Every three years, 750,000 fifteen-year-olds sit the same test in reading, maths and science, so governments can understand how their schools are performing over time and how they compare to the rest of the world.

Australia's reading and maths results in the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, published earlier this month, are our worst on record. 

Australia has never spent more on educating our children, yet today’s fifteen-year-olds are nearly two years behind in reading compared with their peers in 2000, and over two years behind in maths compared to those tested in 2003. 

Every Australian state and territory now has more students falling short of the OECD's baseline standard in maths and reading than at the start of this century. Almost half of students from the poorest families don’t reach this basic standard in maths, compared with 15% from the wealthiest, while among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students that rises to 57%.

Plenty of countries with less wealth than Australia are now outperforming us. Poland, for instance, has pulled ahead in maths, while Estonia has consistently beaten us across reading, maths and science in both the 2022 and 2025 cycles. 

England is another important comparator. Its PISA ranking has improved substantially over two decades, and in 2025 it bucked the downward trend across reading, maths and science in many comparable countries. 

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare is right to point to England's success with systematic phonics in the teaching of reading, and Australia is right to follow suit. But phonics is only part of the story. England's climb up the rankings is the result of sustained reforms to what children are taught, how teachers are trained, how schools are run and how performance is measured. England didn't get everything right, but it followed the evidence, did the hard work, and has the results to show for it. 

Australia, by contrast, is still tinkering at the edges: a phonics check, an explicit-teaching push, and now a modest review of the primary maths curriculum. Each of these are worthwhile, but school reform is complex, and we’re playing whack-a-mole, solving discrete problems rather than constructing a strong and coherent plan. 

Such a plan starts with a clear vision: an ambitious curriculum, taught by skilled teachers, in schools with a culture of high expectations for student achievement and behaviour.

Critically, the vision must be paired with the structures and institutions to deliver it.

The first step is focusing on what children are taught. The Australian Curriculum is too vague about the knowledge children need to unlock learning. We need a more ambitious curriculum, benchmarked against the best in the world and clear about the knowledge every Australian child should leave school with. 

A stronger curriculum needs teachers equipped to teach it. That means fixing how universities train new teachers, so it's based on evidence, not folklore and ideology. It also means supporting teachers to develop further throughout their careers, specialising in areas like student behaviour or disability, or leading a subject, a year level or a school. England designed and rolled out a new national teacher training system in just five years. Australia should show the same ambition. 

Teachers also need calm and orderly classrooms so they can actually teach, but PISA shows Australia’s disciplinary climate is worse than in 68 other countries. Principals should be setting a culture of high expectations and putting in place processes to ensure poor behaviour is managed by school leaders, freeing teachers to focus on teaching. 

Principals themselves need more support. Australian principals work an average of 54 hours a week during term – more of it on administration than on students. We can’t ask principals to work harder. But equally the answer isn't to lower our ambitions for students. 

Instead, Australia should test new school structures that move beyond treating schools as isolated islands or relying on one-size-fits-all government-led models that struggle to give individual schools the flexibility and support they need at the time they need it. 

Over half of England’s government schools now belong to a multi-academy trust – a formal group of schools under shared leadership. Trusts can pool staff and back-office functions such as finance and HR, while developing a common blueprint for school improvement. This means schools can tackle shared challenges together, rather than every principal having to solve them alone. 

Trusts have been a powerful vehicle for turning around struggling schools and they now drive innovation across the English school system. According to the UK Department for Education, over 70% of previously underperforming schools improved to a “good” or “outstanding” rating after joining a trust.

Recent research shows that English schools who joined a multi-academy trust saw an impressive 6 percentile point rise in performance rankings, equivalent to thousands more primary and secondary school children hitting key benchmarks in reading, writing and maths.  

McKinnon, an independent philanthropic organisation, is partnering with the Tasmanian government to support a trial of a similar model, called multi-school organisations, adapted for Tasmania.