Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australia's education system has been in decline for 20 years. An entire generation of students have learned less than they would have a generation earlier, through no fault of their own. Today, a 15-year-old is, on average, a year behind in learning compared with a 15-year-old in 2000. The same 15-year-old in Australia is three years behind a 15-year-old student in Singapore in regard to their knowledge of maths. Students haven't got worse; we've failed them. What's most distressing is that we've all been asleep at the wheel, no matter how many alarm bells have been rung.

It's been commonplace to read headlines about declining school performance and for a swathe of arguments to follow about how the tests aren't good enough or don't illustrate the whole picture, or how the government is not funding schools well enough. This is nonsense. It avoids us facing up to this generational crisis. While school funding has increased, school performance has declined. In the latest PISA reports, school principals reported fewer staff and material shortages than the OECD average, yet continual declines in key indicators of learning, literacy and numeracy, and science should trouble us all.

With such a serious challenge before us, it is little wonder that the revised national curriculum has drawn fire. Reading the proposed changes is depressing. As Kenneth Clark said:

It's lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

Instead of raising aspiration and addressing the shortfalls, we see—

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