Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Teacher Staffroom from Teacher magazine, the resource for K-12 educators published by ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research. I’m Dominique Beech.
In case you missed it, this month saw the highly anticipated release of the PISA 2025 results. PISA, of course, stands for Programme for International Student Assessment and is the world’s largest international assessment of student learning from the OECD. It assesses how well 15-year-old students can apply their knowledge and skills in science, reading and mathematics to real-world situations. PISA has been run in cycles for many years now and the last 5 cycles have also included a special domain. For 2025, the special domain was Learning in the Digital World.
PISA 2025 involved over 700,000 15-year-old students globally, including over 14,000 students from 766 schools in Australia. The Australian Council for Educational Research is responsible for the design and implementation of PISA globally and it led the transition to a fully digital assessment platform for PISA 2025. As always, there is plenty to digest from the results. At Teacher, we’ve shared insights from multiple experts to begin to unpack the results, and I’m excited to share these with you in today’s episode. There’s plenty to catch you up on, so let’s get started.
The PISA 2025 results were released on the evening of Tuesday 8 September, and if you’re a subscriber to the Teacher bulletin, you will have received our overview article of the results straight to your inbox as soon as they were announced. In the article, our Deputy Editor Rebecca Vukovic takes you through an overview of the international results, a breakdown of Australia’s results across mathematics, science and reading, and some interesting demographic breakdowns for the Australian results – including by state and territory, school sector, gender, geographic location, socioeconomic background, and First Nations students. As you can hear, there is plenty to read about in the piece, so I encourage you to head to our website, teachermagazine.com, to read the full article.
The following day, Teacher editor Jo Earp was in attendance at an event held by ACER and the University of Melbourne to bring together researchers, policymakers, system leaders and educators to begin to unpack the findings. Jo facilitated a panel discussion all about the barriers and enablers to better use of evidence in schools and she wrote an article to share more about the day with Teacher readers. The day featured talks from ACER CEO Lisa Rodgers, University of Melbourne Professor John Hattie, and more.
The event also featured a video presentation from OECD Director of Education and Skills – and Teacher columnist – Andreas Schleicher. You can find out more about Andreas’ presentation in his latest Teacher column titled PISA 2025: The first global educational insights. It’s a longer piece, but it’s certainly worthwhile to sit down and read if you have the chance. Andreas takes us through the global map of educational performance across the domains of science, and he also encourages us to have a deeper think about the reading results, which are declining globally. Here’s what Andreas had to say on that:
When we look at the kind of reading tasks that have become much more difficult for students, these are typically higher order thinking tasks – evaluating, reflecting on information, triangulating sources, validating information. What has been less affected are tasks that require students just to look up single pieces of information. We have also seen that students resort more to hasty reading. They read quickly but not accurately. The share of ‘hasty readers’ has almost doubled since 2018. And now you think about it, when you read a book, you have to build a complex mental representation of things you do not see in front of you. You have to entertain different characters, how they interact, you have to memorise lots of information, you have triangulate. Those are the kinds of reading skills that we have perhaps better developed in the analogue world and that we actually need now in the AI world. We just process that kind of marmalade that comes out of chatbots without necessarily reflecting as much on this. It's a hypothesis, but something that we should take seriously.
This month also saw us welcome ACER CEO Lisa Rodgers as a Teacher columnist. In her first column, she offers a different story about PISA that is built around 5 ideas – position, direction, distribution, resolution and ambition.
Lisa says the release of PISA 2025 results should be one of those moments of renewal for us. She writes: ‘Not because there's a new set of numbers, but because those numbers give us a chance to look honestly at ourselves and decide what we'll do differently. What will we take on? What will we choose to do with what PISA is telling us?’
It’s a really thought provoking article and I’m sure you’ll all enjoy reading it. What I’d like to share here, though, is Lisa’s final words in her piece:
Five ideas, one responsibility to ensure that a young person's future trajectory is never mistaken for their identity. Likelihood is not destiny – not for a child, not for a school, and not for the Australian education system. The true measure of our system is not what it measures, it will be what it changes on the basis of these data. Our responsibility is to ensure that the future is not predicted by these data but improved because of it.
The last piece of PISA content I’d like to share with you in this episode is for all of you podcast fans out there. I spoke with ACER Research Director Dr Jonas Bertling – who has worked on PISA for many years – all about the results in detail. So, if you’d prefer to listen to some audio to tell you all about PISA 2025, this is the episode for you. Here’s a short clip from our conversation.
My main message would really be that the future of learning may be increasingly digital, but learning remains profoundly human. And that also means good teachers who can build strong relationships with students as humans matter now and will matter in the future. PISA 2025 reminds us that students need strong foundations in science, mathematics, and reading, but they also need to use knowledge flexibly, evaluate evidence, solve unfamiliar problems, learn with technology, and reflect on feedback. And those capabilities do not develop through technology alone. They grow through purposeful teaching, rich tasks, high expectations, and supportive relationships. So I want to mention once more the fact that 8 in 10 Australian students says their teacher supports every student’s learning. And I think that's really an important message to take away here, that these teachers matter.
Sticking with podcasts for the moment, and if you are a fan of our School Assembly series – where we follow a foundation principal along their journey to find out what it takes to build a school from the ground up – you’ll be excited to know we recently published an episode where we catch up with all the principals from the last 3 series. Of course, as a reminder, they are Dan McShea from Notre Dame P-12 College in Queensland, Jo Camozzato from Bemin Secondary College in Victoria, and Dr Ray Boyd and Rachael Lehr from Dayton Primary School in Western Australia. It was wonderful to hear how they’re all going in their ongoing journeys and really interesting to see how their different contexts are informing their priorities.
Here’s a short clip from our series 3 principal, Dan McShea:
All of our schools naturally move through different seasons, planning, growth, celebration. But a lot of our work is around building. And when you look around – and we've all been there in other contexts – there's a lot of reactionary leadership. And I was actually speaking to a colleague the other day who was asking me about this opportunity and it is really different. We're not putting out fires all day, we're planting seeds and it's really exciting. It's a different sort of work. It's hard work. It's exhausting. But it’s also exciting and you see the rewards of that.
That’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. I’ll leave the links to the full articles and podcast episodes I mentioned today in the transcript of this podcast, which you can find under the podcast tab at our website, teachermagazine.com. And don’t forget to sign up to receive the weekly Teacher Bulletin by following the prompts on the righthand side of the website homepage. That way you’ll have our latest content sent straight to your inbox, so you never miss a story. We’ll be back with a new episode very soon.
Teacher magazine is published by the Australian Council for Educational Research.
