Australia's education system shows "the first little green shoots of change" halfway through a 10-year improvement plan, but the government is blaming Labor for the bleak picture that a new report says persists for disadvantaged students.
The report on the Council of Australian Governments' agreement to improve early childhood and school education says there is good progress in early schooling and more people completing Year 12.
But the COAG Reform Council report, released on Wednesday, also shows more than one in four young Australians are neither learning nor earning, while indigenous or low socio-economic students still lag their more advantaged peers in terms of achievement.
Secondary students' results are also patchy and Australia continues to trail internationally.
"It is a compilation of existing studies that generally exposes the fact that ... Labor's promised education revolution and overblown rhetoric failed to deliver the outcomes people were promised," Education Minister Christopher Pyne told AAP in a statement.
Yet COAG Reform Council chair John Brumby said the five years covered in the report showed "the first little green shoots of change".
"The education system was never going to be completely revamped in five years," he said.
"But if reforms are to realise their full potential, governments must stay the course."
The Australian Greens and the Australian Education Union says the council's findings underline the need for the coalition government to commit to the full new school funding system put in place by the previous Labor government.
"We defy Minister Pyne to read this report and conclude that educational disadvantage isn't a definitive factor in student performance in Australia today," union federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said.
Mr Pyne said the continued obsession with funding ignored other areas the coalition planned to focus on, such as teacher quality, parental engagement, curriculum and school autonomy.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry was alarmed that 27 per cent of young Australians aged 17 to 24 weren't fully engaged in work or study - a percentage that has increased over time.
It wants the government to work more closely with employers to develop plans for jobs growth, combat youth unemployment and bolster the apprenticeship system.
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