Australia must urgently modernise its industrial era model of school education and move towards individualised learning for all students.
That is the central recommendation of a wide-ranging report by businessman David Gonski and a panel of experts commissioned by the Federal Government.
The report says too many Australian children are failing to reach their potential at school because of the restrictive nature of year-level progression.
It calls for the implementation across states of a new online assessment tool that teachers would use to diagnose the exact level of literacy and numeracy a child has achieved.
Teachers could then create individual learning plans for students that would not be tied to what year group they are in.
The Federal Government has agreed to implement all of the report's recommendations.
It hopes to use the report to develop a new national schooling agreement.
If formative online assessments were instituted and reported nationally, it would downgrade the intense focus on the yearly NAPLAN tests in favour of continuous, real-time measurement of student progress.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the report highlighted the urgent need to arrest the declining results in maths, reading and science over the past two decades.
"We can and must do more," Mr Turnbull said.
"We now have the blueprint to do it."
Education Minister Simon Birmingham said he would enter into talks with the states and territories about how to implement Mr Gonski's recommendations.
"We want to see a system out of this report where each student is stretched to the maximum of their capabilities each and every year over the twelve or thirteen years of their schooling," Mr Birmingham said.
"It really is essential that teachers know and are able to chart where their students are up to in terms of what they're learning, how they're progressing and that parents are fully engaged as part of that process as well."
Mass education model holding back students
Mr Gonski said in his report that the structure of Australian schools reflected "a twentieth century aspiration to deliver mass education to all children".
The report recommended shifting from that industrial education model to one where schools focused on achieving each individual student's "maximum potential growth in learning each year".
The report found current assessment tools in schools did not provide teachers with "real-time or detailed data on a student's growth".
"Nor do they provide teachers with information or resources about suggested next steps to improve student outcomes," the report said.
Furthermore, while tests like NAPLAN and the international sample test PISA provided "a useful big picture view of student learning trends across Australia and the world", they provided limited assistance to teachers at the classroom level.
The report also said the current "rigidity of curriculum delivery, and assessment and reporting models" were holding Australia back.
Several state governments lodged submissions to the Gonski review, pointing out that current assessment tools used by teachers were not uniform across all schools.
The Victorian education department described current assessment tools in its state as "idiosyncratic".
Mixed-ability classes preferable
Many schools rely on gifted and talented programs to extend bright students but the report said evidence showed that mixed-ability classes were preferable.
It said streaming children by ability "has little effect in improving student outcomes and [has] profoundly negative equity effects".
It recommended overhauling the curriculum to focus on "learning progressions" that extended all students, regardless of ability.
Other key recommendations included:
- Setting up a national inquiry to review curriculum and assessment in years 11 and 12
- Establishing a national educational research institute
- Implementing greater principal autonomy
- Providing more rewards for high-performing teachers
- Overhauling the current A-E grading scale to instead measure progression gains
- Introducing a 'unique student identifier' for all students that allows progress to be tracked across time, even if a student changes schools or moves interstate
A special meeting of the Education Council will be held on Friday to discuss the recommendations in the report, titled Through Growth to Achievement: Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools.
In 2011, Mr Gonski was commissioned by the Gillard government to compile a major report on school funding.
The review formed the basis for what's known as the Gonski legislation that created a baseline resourcing standard across all schooling sectors.
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