The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results from 2012 reveals that Australian students are dropping in international education standards.
The study shows that Australian 15-year-olds ranked 17th out of 65 countries in maths, 8th in science and 10th in reading.
However the report also shows that Australian students in the lowest socio-economic quartile are performing on average at a rate equivalent to two-and-half years behind the highest socio-economic quartile, while the same gap also occurred between the results of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.
Ken Cruickshank, an Associate Professor of Education at Sydney University, says a large proportion of these low socio-economic students are from non-English speaking or refugee backgrounds.
"We have the data to show that students from Pacific island backgrounds, Arabic speaking backgrounds, Maltese backgrounds, refugee students, those with disrupted education backgrounds have unacceptably low outcomes," he says. "This gets lost in the aggregated data, however."
Listen to the full interview with Associate Professor Cruickshank below
His recent report, '"Passing the Buck": Local schools, local decisions and ESL Education in NSW Government Schools', highlights the difficulties that refugee and other students with disrupted education and limited literacy skills face within the Australian education system.
The PISA report shows that the proportion of students who were low performers was higher for students who spoke a language other than English at home (23%) compared to students who spoke only English at home (18%).
Cruickshank says the segmentation of schools is the main contributor to the increase of inequality in education results. "There's such a growing difference between rich and poor schools now," he says, "that's reflected in the enrolment of kids from Non-English Speaking Backgrounds (NESB) too. So you're finding disadvantaged schools with kids from, for example, Arabic-speaking backgrounds without the resources."
He says the answer to the Australia's declining rankings lies in a greater emphasis on needs-based funding, as international research shows that focussing on the lowest-achieving students boosts the education results overall.
Sue Thomson, who helps manage PISA for the Australian Council for Educational Research, said it is concerning the large gap between the most advantaged and least advantaged students had persisted over the past decade.
"Probably by the time they finish school, it's a little bit more, which doesn't augur very well for low socio-economic students in terms of further study or jobs," Dr Thomson said.
"That's where things like the funding argument comes in, looking at targeted funding for disadvantaged students. They're the ones who we really need to work on to try and help."
The Australian Education Union said these unacceptable gaps underlined the importance of needs-based school funding.
"This must be a wake-up call to the Abbott government," deputy federal president Correna Haythorpe said.
The Australian Greens said if the gap between the top and bottom students wasn't narrowed, Australia wouldn't be able to raise its overall education performance.
Education Minister Christopher Pyne said the PISA report showed how critical teacher quality was to lifting student performance.
"It is concerning that our high performing students are not doing as well as students from other countries and that our low performing students are performing very poorly," he said.
"PISA has found that in Australia, it matters more which teacher you are allocated as opposed to which school you attend."
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