Why Australia’s literacy and numeracy results remain uneven
Reposted from Eureka Street on 27 August 2026
Two findings from this year’s NAPLAN national data release highlight almost everything you need to know about the state of literacy and numeracy in primary and secondary schools in Australia. Numeracy in Years 5, 7 and 9 is slowly improving, up by 6 or more points since 2023. Reading tells a mixed story with annual data showing inconsistencies in how these same students perform. The same students sit both tests in the same classrooms during the same week. Why, then, is progress in one foundational skill not being matched in the other?
The headline doing the rounds for the last four years is that, on average, one-third of Australian students are not meeting proficiency standards set for the year level. In real terms, that is approximately 400,000 students. As experts, we know that NAPLAN data is much more than a check on the progress of an individual child, teacher or school. Its value is about examining population-level trends and student outcomes in teaching and learning, and cannot tell us everything about why students fall behind. The trends show that modest recent gains in one domain are not translating into gains across the board.
In fact, the picture has been one of stagnation over the last decade, in spite of increased education funding and access to more robust evidence about optimal instructional approaches. Resistance to implementing evidence-based classroom instruction approaches remains entrenched in most Australian university pre-service teacher education programs. This resistance has influenced policymakers and schools for many years, resulting in decades-long ‘stuck’ practice, which has only recently begun to change, but not across the board, and not led ‘from the top’ in pre-service teacher education.
We come at the problem of the unacceptably high proportion of Australian students not meeting literacy and numeracy standards from three different but overlapping disciplines. As a group, we have a mathematics academic [CM], a speech pathologist and literacy researcher [TS], and a cognitive psychologist, who is also a speech pathologist [PS]. CM has worked with teachers from pre-service through to school leadership and knows that a student only understands why three groups of four is twelve if what came before it was taught explicitly and actually stuck. TS, whose work sits inside the mechanics of how to ensure that children become fluent readers, explores why this knowledge has not consistently been transferred into classroom practice. PS has spent decades studying how children learn to read and why literacy acts as a protective factor across a person's whole life. None of us set out to agree with each other. But the evidence in each of our fields keeps landing in the same place.
Let’s begin with evidence from the field of cognitive science. Literacy and numeracy are surprisingly connected subjects occupying prime time in school timetables, and both are non-negotiable gateways to all other learning and academic success. A student who cannot decode and recognise words fluently cannot comprehend or write text in any other subject. Similarly, a student who hasn’t mastered number facts and basic operations to the point of fluency has no spare mental space for the reasoning and problem solving required for fractions, percentages, algebra and other subjects. Fewer than one in five students still behind by Year 3 ever catch up. This is exactly why this year's NAPLAN data further reinforces the persistent and stagnating proficiency levels for students across all year levels.
Over the last ten years, there has been a gradual adoption by some Australian states and territories (South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania) of a Year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC). This is a brief (less than 10 minutes) standardised screening process carried out by classroom teachers to identify (and then support) children early when they are having difficulties cracking the English writing code. The implementation of the PSC in England in 2012 resulted in on-the-ground shifts in mainstream teaching that have led to lifts in England’s performance on international rankings. Effective decoding is necessary but not sufficient of course; teachers also need to be teaching vocabulary, sentence, structure, and background knowledge. But an absence of decoding proficiency means there is no foundation on which these more complex skills can develop.
A Year 1 numeracy check, also intended to screen struggling students two years before the first NAPLAN test in Year 3, is being rolled out alongside a national review of the Foundation-to-Year-2 mathematics curriculum. Some Australian states and territories are ahead of the game while others are still piloting approaches. Identifying a struggling student is the easy part. What happens next is what matters: clear, direct teaching of the specific skill, until the student can do it accurately and reliably, before moving on to the repeated practice that makes it automatic. Accuracy first, then fluency. What is needed in both literacy and numeracy is a paradigm shift in classroom instruction.
Core to improving students’ literacy and numeracy proficiency, we urge the implementation of explicit, scaffolded and sustained instruction, and early, targeted intervention. This aligns with the reported evidence from cognitive science, in literacy research, and in mathematics education research and classroom practice. This really matters. Explicit teaching is often erroneously dismissed as ‘boring’, ‘drill and kill’ and ‘old fashioned’. This is a significant misinterpretation of what explicit instruction is; namely, fast-paced, inclusive of all students, and highly interactive when delivered by knowledgeable teachers trained in its principles.
'If a cognitive psychologist, a literacy researcher and a mathematics educator and academic can arrive at the same answer independently, the real question isn't whether the evidence exists. It's whether initial teacher education and ongoing professional learning for in-service teachers act on that knowledge.'
Of great concern are the equity gaps between vulnerable and non-vulnerable student groups. Students from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds score well below those from the highest, at every year level, in both literacy and numeracy. A student in a very remote school is barely a third as likely to reach strong or exceeding in literacy and/or in numeracy as one in a major city. According to this year’s NAPLAN data, nearly one-third of Indigenous students need additional support in reading and numeracy. This compares to about one in twelve for non-Indigenous students.
Explicit, evidence-aligned instruction is what narrows the gap. A school system that hasn't equipped every teacher to deliver evidence-aligned instruction, is a system that lets that gap compound instead. Students from more advantaged backgrounds receive invisible supports from language and text-rich home environments and access to tutoring. NAPLAN data, however, should say more about the school instruction students receive than about their postcodes.
Some initiatives are supporting this shift toward evidence-based practice. At the School of Education at La Trobe University, this work takes two forms. The first is short courses for teachers and instructional leaders, offered through both the Science of Mathematics Education (SOME) Lab, which focuses on explicit mathematics teaching, building fluency tools and running webinars for instructional leaders on lifting early numeracy, and the Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab, which does the same work in reading and writing.
The second is large-scale studies exploring the implementation of school improvement strategies in both literacy and mathematics, including a SOLAR trial in collaboration with the Australian Education Research Organisation examining the impact of classroom-based coaching. This is what happens when the evidence from cognitive psychology, the psychology of reading, and mathematics education moves beyond journals and is translated into classrooms. There are plenty of examples of schools adopting these practices and seeing an uplift in their NAPLAN data, but this is not yet scaled sufficiently to be significantly ‘shifting the national needle’.
If a cognitive psychologist, a literacy researcher and a mathematics educator and academic can arrive at the same answer independently, the real question isn't whether the evidence exists. It's whether initial teacher education and ongoing professional learning for in-service teachers act on that knowledge. That work has already started in initial teacher education, with new accreditation requirements pushing providers toward evidence-based instruction.
But most teachers standing in front of a classroom right now graduated years ago, often before this evidence was taught to them (even though it has been available for decades). Overhauling initial teacher education hasn't reached them and won't for years yet.
In the meantime, sustained, in-school professional learning is what closes that gap: not a one-off workshop, but ongoing support to help teachers translate the evidence into what happens in their classroom. Teachers have done their best with the preparation they were given; the task now is making sure all teachers finally catch up with the evidence, wherever that happens.
Snow, P., Serry, T., Buckingham, J., Hammond, L., Dinham, S., Charles, E., Weadman, T., Swain, N., Hiland, S., & Daffern, T. (2025). National and International Monitoring of Student Literacy and Numeracy Attainment: The Case for Rigorous Macro and Micro Analysis. Australian Journal of Social Issues. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajs4.70049
Associate Professor Chrissy Monteleone serves as Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching at the School of Education, La Trobe University. She also co-directs the Science of Mathematics Education (SOME) Lab with Professor Anna Stokke. Her research focuses on mathematics in young students, teacher questioning practices, and professional experience in initial teacher education, including mentor feedback quality and university-school partnerships.
Professor Tanya Serry is Professor of Literacy at La Trobe University, Australia, with a background in Speech Pathology and Linguistics. Her research focuses on language, literacy, learning difficulties, and implementation science, with particular emphasis on improving classroom practice through evidence-based professional learning. She co-founded the Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab and currently leads large-scale research on instructional coaching and the implementation of structured literacy in schools.
Distinguished Professor Pamela Snow is Co-Director of the Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab in the School of Education at La Trobe University. Her research concerns the role of language and literacy skills as academic and mental health protective factors in childhood and adolescence, and advancing evidence in the language-to-literacy transition in the early years of school, including a focus on initial and in-service teacher education.
