“He just doesn’t write.” The gap is real, and it has a size.

The short answer

In ACARA’s 2025 national results, at Year 9, 69.1% of girls reached “Strong” or above in writing, against 53.9% of boys. That is a gap of just over fifteen percentage points, in the country’s own census-scale test, published by the authority that runs it. At Year 7 the comparison is 71.1% against 57.0% — the same shape, slightly narrower.

In writing: Girls score 35.3 NAPLAN scale score points higher on average; 27.4% of girls achieve a level of Exceeding, compared to 16.3% of boys; 69.1% of girls achieve a level of Strong or above, compared to 53.9% of boys; 91.0% of girls achieve a level of Developing or above, compared to 82.7% of boys.

ACARA, 2025 NAPLAN National Results Commentary. Registered as WRI-08 in the evidence register.

It is not new, and it does not close on its own

The single-year figure could be a fluctuation. It is not. A peer-reviewed longitudinal study of NAPLAN language conventions from 2008 to 2021 found the pattern held in every year level, in every year of testing — and that the spelling gap narrowed while the grammar and punctuation gap in the secondary years did the opposite.

Girls in all four year levels outperformed boys on every spelling and grammar and punctuation test for every year of NAPLAN testing… The spelling gender gaps in all tested year levels closed in recent years of testing. The grammar and punctuation gender gaps in Years 3 and 5 closed in recent years, while the gaps widened in Years 7 and 9…

Thomas, Swain, Walton & Hicks (2023), International Journal of Educational Research, vol. 120. Registered as LAN-09.

That last clause is the one worth sitting with. The gap that closed was the one in spelling — the most teachable, most drillable part. The gap that widened was in grammar and punctuation at Years 7 and 9, which is the part that governs whether a sentence can carry a complicated idea. It widened at exactly the age when school starts asking for complicated ideas.

What this does not say about your son

A population gap is not a prediction about a person, and it is worth being exact about the difference, because the exactness is the reassurance.

• More than half of boys reached Strong or above. 53.9% is a majority, not a failure. The gap is real and it is also a gap between two large groups that overlap almost entirely.
• It says nothing about capacity. Neither source offers a cause. The studies measure an outcome; they do not claim boys are less able to write, and no honest reading of them supports that.
• It is not a statement about one test day.Your son’s result is one timed piece written on one morning. What a single report can and cannot show sets out the limits of that number.

And one thing parents often get wrong in the other direction

The common follow-up worry is that writing generally is collapsing. The register complicates that. AERO found a real decline — but in one genre only.

There has been an overall decline in student achievement of persuasive writing skills. Average (mean) scores for Persuasive writing demonstrate a downward trend since 2011 with the decline more pronounced in the secondary years (Years 7 and 9).

AERO (2022), Writing development report. Registered as WRI-01.

In the same report, narrative writing did not follow suit: Year 3 slightly improved, Year 9 remained stable, and the movement in between was not statistically significant (WRI-05). So “writing is in decline” is too broad a sentence to be true. Persuasive writing in the secondary years is the specific thing that fell, and it is the specific thing worth teaching.

What actually moves it

Not practice tests. The gap that widened is in grammar, punctuation and the structure of an argument at Years 7 to 9 — which is to say, in sentences. That is built by writing sentences and having them read closely by someone who can name what went wrong, weekly, over terms rather than weeks.

There is evidence for that distinction, and it is worth stating because it cuts against the obvious answer. A systematic review of ten experimental studies concluded there is no high quality evidence that the teaching of grammar, whether traditional or generative/transformational, is worth the time if the aim is the improvement of the quality and/or accuracy of written composition (EPPI-Centre, 2004 — registered as LAN-10). Note the condition the review attaches: it is about grammar taught to improve writing. So grammar worksheets are not the answer to a grammar gap, which is the counter-intuitive part.

But a later blind-randomised trial of 744 students in 31 English schools tested something different — grammar taught in context, tied explicitly to the writing being done — and reports a significant positive effect for the intervention, while noting that this benefit was experienced more strongly by the more able writers in the sample (Myhill et al., 2012 — registered as LAN-13). Two findings, one distinction: not whether grammar is taught, but whether it is attached to a sentence the student actually wrote.

That is the case for reading a child’s own writing closely rather than drilling rules at them, and it comes with two stated limits. The trial found the effect strongest among students already writing well, so it is not a promise about a struggling writer. And it has not replicated: a later cluster-randomised trial of the same approach across 155 English primary schools and 7,239 Year 6 pupils found no evidence of benefit to writing at all (frontier reading FR-18). One positive trial in one school year, against a much larger one that did not reproduce it, is a reason to prefer the method on judgement rather than to claim it is proven.

There is also something specific that does work on sentences. The companion review of eighteen studies concluded that sentence combining is an effective means of improving the syntactic maturity of students in English between the ages of 5 and 16, while noting that immediate post-test effects are seen to be positive with some tempering of the effect in delayed post-tests (EPPI-Centre, 2004 — LAN-11). Joining short sentences into longer ones that hold together is a teachable move, and it is closer to what actually happens in a lesson than naming parts of speech.

The honest bottom of all this is a caution, not a conclusion. The synthesis of both reviews found little evidence to indicate that the teaching of formal grammar is effective; and that teaching sentence-combining has a more positive effect, then added the part worth quoting against ourselves: [i]n both cases, however, despite over a hundred years of research and debate on the topic, there is insufficient quality of research to prove the case with either approach (Andrews et al., 2006 — LAN-12). So the distinction above is the best available reading of a thin literature, not a settled result — and anyone telling you their method is proven is claiming something a century of research has not delivered.

One thing to state plainly about all three: they are reviews of British and North American classrooms, not Australian ones. What they measure — whether teaching grammar rules changes how students write — is not obviously country-specific, and no Australian review of the same size exists to check them against. But they are evidence about teaching English, not evidence about the Australian Curriculum, and they are quoted here as the first.

All four entries sit in the language conventions domain with their full quotes.

If you want to see the shape of it before committing to anything: the writing clinic works one sentence at a time and is free to read, and the NAPLAN writing test explained sets out what the marking criteria actually reward.