Parsing PISA 25

Andy Mison, President and Executive Director, Australian Secondary Principals’ Association

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PISA, the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment, tests the reading, mathematical and scientific literacy of 15-year-olds across more than 90 countries and economies every three years, and Australia has taken part since 2000. The 2025 results were released this week, and the volume of commentary already in circulation is a reminder that a single results day rarely supports the sweeping conclusions drawn from it in the first 48 hours.

Readers are better served by those who work with this data for a living than by the headline cycle. Dr Sally Larsen at the University of New England, a panellist at this week's ACER forum on the 2025 results, has previously found that of the four largest standardised assessments Australian students sit, PISA alone shows a systematic long-term decline, a useful caution against generalising from one instrument to a verdict on the whole system. It’s hard to resist a bandwagon though, so what follows is ASPA's own reading.

The 2025 PISA results show Australian 15-year-olds continuing a decline in reading and mathematics that has now reached the lowest levels recorded since Australia joined PISA in 2000, while science performance held steady. Australia also remains above the OECD average across reading, mathematics, science and computational problem solving, with a larger share of both top performers and students meeting minimum proficiency than the OECD average.

PISA measures aggregate performance across a system educating more than 4 million secondary students. It cannot isolate the effect of any single policy, program or teaching practice from other factors such as funding, staffing, cohort composition and a dozen other variables. When commentary attributes a national movement, up or down, to one intervention, the claim should come with the analysis to support it.

The equity findings need the same care. The gap between Australia's most and least advantaged students narrowed in science from 2015 to 2025, in line with an OECD-wide trend. At face value, that looks like progress. It narrowed because the highest-performing students' scores fell, not because the lowest-performing students' scores rose. In anticipation of pundit commentary to come, citing the narrowing gap as evidence of improving equity, without noting how it occurred, is the kind of unsupported causal claim we should be wary of.

Truancy in Australia is running at nearly double the OECD average: 44 per cent of students reported skipping a full day of school in the fortnight before testing, against an OECD average of 22 per cent, a figure that has risen steadily since 2018. Reported bullying also increased, reversing a decline recorded between 2018 and 2022. Disciplinary disruption in science classrooms remains above the OECD average, though it has improved since 2015.

PISA does not test causes, and we cannot explain rising truancy and bullying, and a still-difficult disciplinary climate, purely through a school-based lens. Youth mental health, the increasingly unhinged digital realm, pandemic-disrupted routines, and cost-of-living pressure on families are all live in the broader debate about adolescent wellbeing. It is reason enough to be wary of any response that assumes better pedagogy, or a different curriculum, will resolve engagement and behaviour trends shaped by forces well beyond the school gate.

What does this mean for practice?

We should treat attendance as a leading indicator, not a compliance metric. A truancy rate double the OECD average, rising for seven years, is a big signal about learning conditions. Schools already investing in engagement and re-engagement are on the right track.

We must also keep building consistent, whole-school behaviour systems. This is achievable: disciplinary climate in Australian science classrooms has improved since 2015, though it has further to go, and it will not close through curriculum change alone. This is a leadership and culture task as much as a teaching one, and also depends on the staffing stability principals need to sustain it.

PISA and NAPLAN should be treated as diagnostic inputs informing locally appropriate interventions, not as a directive to adopt any single external program. School leaders are best placed to interpret national data against their own cohort evidence, and they need the professional latitude and the time to do that well. Local judgement, grounded in professional context, is the right starting point.

We should also give more deliberate attention to instilling a love of reading in young people, at home and at school, and that will likely mean rebalancing how devices are used in both settings. Reading results are now at their lowest recorded level, at the same time as Australian students report using digital devices at school for learning for 2.6 hours a day, well above the OECD average of 1.7, and 39 per cent report frequent digital distraction in class. PISA cannot establish that one explains the other, but the debate over how much of a young person's day is spent on a screen rather than a page, in class and at home, is already well under way. Protected reading time, library investment and teachers who model reading for pleasure are within a school's control. So is a considered position on devices in the classroom. Neither will work in isolation from what happens at home.

Much of what shows up in these figures starts outside the school gate; no principal can resolve cost-of-living pressure on families or the effect of a screen on a teenager's sleep. What schools can do is put effort where our local evidence and professional judgement lead us: school community morale and culture, engagement, behaviour, staffing stability and decisions close to the classroom. Australia's schools remain comparatively strong by international standards. Keeping them that way, and closing the gaps that remain, depends on the same unglamorous, evidence-led work principals do every day.