The literacy results for year 9 students are among the most concerning, with 18.4 per cent of all students failing to meet the band 6 national minimum standard in this year's writing test, which students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 sat in May.
Even though there has been improvement at the primary school level, Education Minister Simon Birmingham admits the results are concerning.
"There is clearly more to be done. That's why this year in addition to reforming school funding, putting an extra $25 billion into a needs-based approach, we asked David Gonski to lead a panel of education experts to come back identifying how can record funding be put to best use? We have to make sure that teachers, school leaders, principals, are armed with evidence of what the best practice is to apply in their classroom."
Gender differences are persistent. Female students perform better than male students in writing, and grammar and punctuation across all year levels.
Students with a language background other than English performed better in spelling than those of non-language background other than English across all years.
Children from migrant backgrounds are topping the nation in Year 3 spelling, while Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island children have improved their results significantly over the past 10 years.
Around 25 per cent of students who attend Darlington Public School in Sydney are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander.
Sean Holmes is a teacher at the school, and decided to change the method of learning.
“I noticed that we weren't meeting the needs of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, I decided to do assessment throughout the school, and I found that it was quite common throughout. So what I did is I took a targeted group of children and I took them for a 10 week program and the idea of the program was a paperless classroom, learning through hands on, the program had masses of success, the children made big gains in just a 10 week period and yeah due to the success of the program it's now going to be running throughout the school next year."
