Declining student test results in maths, reading and science will cost Australia nearly $120 billion over coming decades, a new report has found.
Not-for-profit organisation, the Public Education Foundation, has calculated the figure using six years of Australia's data from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and a formula used by the OECD to measure the impact of such results on long-term economic performance.
In its report 'What Price the Gap? Education and Inequality in Australia' released on Tuesday, the foundation found the cost of the fall in Australia's education performance from 2009 to 2015 was $118.6 billion.
Of that figure, $20 billion could be attributable to students at the bottom being allowed to fall further than those at the top.
"It is widely understood that Australia's school performance (as measured by international test scores) has been falling," report author David Hetherington said.
"What's less understood is that this headline buries a stark, unpalatable fact: our international test results show that kids at the bottom of the performance distribution are falling faster and further than kids at the top."
The OECD calculates that a 50-point fall in PISA test scores leads to a decline in long-term GDP growth of 0.87 per cent per year.
