Published in The Australian, 17 October 2026
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The OECD last month released the latest results of its Program for International Student Assessment. Results highlighted the decline of Australian secondary students in maths and reading, after years of falling scores in science.
While the initial focus is always on scores and international rankings, around the world politicians and system leaders look at the results of international assessments and try to work out what it means for them: What are high-performing countries doing that we are not? How can we improve performance?
Singapore has finished at or near the top of international assessments for many years, so there is always discussion asking what does Singapore do? Singapore has a strong curriculum in most subjects, and excellent teacher and leader development, but struggles with aspects of inequality. Given Australia is nearly 11,000 times larger, some Singapore lessons would be difficult to implement well in Australia.
Some people say we should be more like Finland because it finished high on international tables at the start of the century. But Finland has seen some of the largest declines of any country since that time.
Recent international results have shifted attention to changes in performance in the United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, Portugal.
For context, school education in the UK is not directed from London. Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England each has responsibility for school education in the respective countries, and performance this century has diverged markedly between them. The reasons are the focus of many international education policy discussions and are important for Australia.
For several decades, a growing trend in education has been to focus on skills and competencies; 21st-century skills, critical thinking, problem solving and so on. This contrasted with what was considered a traditional approach of learning knowledge and related skills within subjects. This led to significant changes in policy and especially curriculum in parts of the UK.
Northern Ireland was the first to move when, in 2007, it introduced a skills-based curriculum, reducing the explicit focus on knowledge in subjects in favour of generic skills. Scotland followed in 2010, when it introduced the Curriculum for Excellence. It publicly rejected the traditional focus on acquiring knowledge in subjects and shifted its schools to interdisciplinary learning; where subjects were combined in various ways, often with the objective of learning generic skills rather than knowledge and practices within subjects. Wales followed Scotland with a curriculum review in 2015 that shifted focus to generic skills.
In contrast, in 2013, England undertook reform with a focus on a knowledge-rich curriculum, with a new national curriculum complemented by external assessments at both primary and secondary schools, and a focus on reviewing what was taught in schools to support curriculum improvement.
A knowledge-rich curriculum differs from a skills or competency-based curriculum in many ways, but there are a few key differences. Learning in a knowledge-rich curriculum follows the cognitive science research and explicitly scaffolds knowledge acquisition in clear and achievable steps in subjects. Progression of learning is of the knowledge and related skills that students develop towards mastery of each subject.
In contrast, a skills-based curriculum will still have subjects, but learning is regularly portrayed as growth in generic skills, and the integration of subjects is often encouraged. There is often a focus on a skill or a concept rather than the knowledge students need to learn that concept. For example, students may be supposed to learn about the concept of social diversity, rather than learn the knowledge of diversity in their society; knowledge of the different groups in their society, the detail of the history of migration in their country, and how this has changed their society over time. They may be supposed to learn to “think like a scientist” rather than learn the scientific knowledge and skills in each area of science.
These differences were very apparent in the curriculum reforms in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland compared to that in England. What has been the impact?
In international assessments, England has moved from around 20th-25th in the world in 2012 into the top 10 in every tested subject by 2025. Results elsewhere in Britain have fallen dramatically. In 2010, when Scotland introduced its Curriculum for Excellence, Scottish students performed above their peers in England in mathematics. Now their students perform well over a year behind students in England. Similar falls are evident in Wales.
Similar results followed curriculum reform in Portugal. In 2011, reform of the Portuguese curriculum moved away from generic skills to a focus on mastery of subject knowledge. Portugal’s performance on international assessments rose, and the share of low performers fell. But in 2016 a new government was elected and reverted to a skills-based curriculum. Results fell, with some of the sharpest declines ever seen in international assessments over a three-year period.
The lessons for Australia are clear. The Australian Curriculum was agreed by ministers in 2008, with an initial release in 2010. The Australian Curriculum reflected changes in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It emphasises generic skills and portrays progression in learning in these skills.
Teachers are supposed to combine these generic skills with learning in subjects, along with three cross-curriculum priorities. All this blurs learning progression in subjects. Even now, 15 years after its initial introduction, teachers are still saying they struggle with how to incorporate and assess the generic skills and capabilities.
The falls in learning in Australia after the introduction of the Australian Curriculum reflect declines in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Portugal after they introduced skills-based curriculums. In science, Australian students now perform a year lower in the PISA assessments than they did before the Australian Curriculum was introduced. In the recent PISA assessment, our students have never performed lower in reading and maths.
Research has highlighted the problems in sequencing of learning in science and maths in the Australian Curriculum. These problems more regularly occur with skills-based curriculums and significantly hurt learning and equity.
In the UK, Northern Ireland has responded to the falls in student performance and announced a shift to a knowledge-rich curriculum. Reforms are well under way. In many countries, policymakers are looking at what happened in Britain and Portugal. The implications for the Australian Curriculum are clear. But is Canberra listening?
Ben Jensen is chief executive of Learning First.