Last week, confirmation of the 20-year ongoing decline in Australia’s reading and maths’ results came from the release of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) for 15-year-olds. Haileybury’s NAPLAN results, VCE results and indeed our own students’ participation in the PISA tests show that Haileybury continues to defy this trend and Haileybury sees ongoing improvement in student results.
PISA has been conducted every three years since 2000. The 2025 results were the worst by Australian students across that period. On average, a 15-year-old today in Australia is about two years behind in their learning on literacy and numeracy than a 15-year-old in 2000. Australia has held its overall rankings amongst the 81 countries and jurisdictions who do the test because there has been an across-the-board decline. Australia ranks 11th in reading and 17th in maths.
Haileybury’s NAPLAN data is exceptional and last year placed Haileybury’s collective results amongst the top four primary schools in Australia and the top four open entry secondary schools in the country. Importantly, Haileybury students are achieving, on average, 2.5 years above the Australian average, which is world class.
Further confirmation of this came with Haileybury students’ own participation in the PISA testing. PISA is a sample test across the 81 countries and jurisdictions. A group of Haileybury 15-year-olds were a part of the random selection for the 2025 testing.
PISA does not give individual school performance scores but does give percentages of students in High Performing, Middle Performing and Low Performing Categories.
On Reading in PISA, 39% of Haileybury 15-year-olds were High Performing against an Australian average of 11%. As a comparison with one of the highest performing countries, Singapore had 22% High Performing.
Still on Reading, 93% of Haileybury 15-year-olds were High or Middle Performing against an Australian average of 76% and a Singapore average of 86%.
It was a similar story in maths, with 41% of Haileybury students High Performing, while Australia was 10% and Singapore 37%. An outstanding 97% of Haileybury students were High or Middle Performing against Australia 71% and Singapore 88%.
There is a lot to analyse in the PISA data, particularly around the reasons for the broad decline across countries and jurisdictions. The head of PISA testing, German statistician Andreas Schleicher, has noted that technology has had a negative impact on deep reading and that ‘students are reading faster, but less precise.’ This flows into a lack of critical thinking and an inability to synthesize information, handle ambiguity and difficulty in differentiating fact from opinion.
Haileybury’s focus is very clear: high expectations, strong foundational skills built through explicit instruction and then a knowledge-rich curriculum which flows into students developing critical and analytical thinking skills.
It is precisely this strategy, coupled with the outstanding Haileybury teachers, which sees Haileybury students defying the downward trend in reading and mathematics in Australia and globally.
