PISA results and education leaders point to system design, assessment practices, uneven rollout of explicit teaching, and funding inequities — not student ability — as core drivers of the long decline.
System-level factors — curriculum design, assessment choices and funding distribution — are central to falling PISA maths and reading scores.
Public funding for schools rose sharply between 2012 and 2022 while PISA performance declined, highlighting that higher spending alone has not reversed the trend.
System design and curriculum framing
Emeritus Professor Kaye Stacey, who has chaired PISA's international maths expert group, attributes much of the decline to how the education system organises mathematics teaching. She identifies a prevalent view of the curriculum as a long list of discrete 'dot points' — skills to be ticked off and rarely revisited. That approach weakens connections across topics and increases forgetting.
Stacey also points to assessment practices that shape classroom priorities. "Mathematics assessment is increasingly dominated by short multiple-choice questions testing simple factual knowledge and routine procedures, with only the final answer being inspected," she said. She calls for regular assessment of students' ability to solve multi-step problems, explain their reasoning and evaluate results.
Stacey recommends policy levers that target teacher supply and capability: financial incentives to attract well-qualified undergraduates into maths teaching, substantial content and pedagogy programs for teachers working out of field, and teacher education that builds deep understanding of the specific mathematics teachers will actually teach.
Explicit teaching and literacy practice
Wider consequences and policy implications
The experts interviewed frame the issue as structural: inequities in funding and school quality, assessment design that narrows classroom focus, gaps in teacher preparation, and piecemeal adoption of evidence-based teaching methods. The combined effect is that higher aggregate spending and repeated reviews have not produced consistent improvements in basic literacy and numeracy outcomes.
The decline in Australia's PISA maths and reading performance is not attributed to a single cause. The evidence cited in the reporting highlights system-level design choices — curriculum framing, assessment formats, uneven pedagogical rollout and funding distribution — as the main explainers. Addressing them requires coordinated policy change rather than incremental fixes focused solely on inputs.
Australian students have recorded their worst ever results in maths and reading, as experts call for a rethink of AI and digital devices in classrooms
In reading, New Zealand reached a new low of 497, caused by a fall in boys’ scores in the international Pisa tests.
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