How Australian students are writing, and which ways of teaching writing carry evidence. 20 verified findings — quoted verbatim, fully cited, independently checked (register v1.3.0, verified 2026-08-24).
What a decade of Australian writing data actually shows
In 2022 the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) published the most detailed look yet at a decade of NAPLAN writing data, and the headline that travelled was blunt: Australian students' writing is in decline. The report itself is more careful than the headline. Its own finding is that average scores in Persuasive writing fell from 2011 to 2018, with the fall sharper in the secondary years than in primary [WRI-01]. But 'writing' is not one thing on a NAPLAN script, and the decline is not evenly spread across it. For Year 9 specifically, AERO's own criteria-level data shows 85% of students found it hard to hit the top score for Text Structure, and 38% scored three or less out of six on Audience — a marker of whether a piece actually engages and persuades a reader, a skill the report ties to readiness for senior secondary study [WRI-02]. That is a real and specific finding. It is not the same as the media paraphrase that circulated, which claimed 85% of Year 9 students were writing at Year 7 level — a sentence that does not appear in the report AERO actually published [WRI-02].
The genre matters as much as the criterion. AERO's decline finding is about Persuasive writing. Narrative writing, tracked separately across 2016, 2019 and 2021, was comparatively stable — slightly up for Year 3, dipping and recovering for Years 5 and 7, flat for Year 9 [WRI-05]. So the accurate claim is narrower and more useful than 'writing is declining': persuasive argument-writing weakened over the decade, more in secondary than primary, more on some criteria than others, while narrative writing largely held its ground. At the criterion level the pattern sharpens further. In the primary years, the decline was concentrated in Text Structure and Persuasive Devices — the shape and rhetorical machinery of a piece. In the secondary years, it showed up in Punctuation, Sentence Structure and Vocabulary — the sentence-level craft [WRI-03]. Spelling was the one criterion that improved across the whole decade [WRI-03]. Even high-achieving students were not exempt: the proportion of Year 5, 7 and 9 students hitting a top score fell on almost every criterion except Spelling, and the gap between low- and high-achieving students widened as students moved up through year levels [WRI-04]. That last point cuts against a remediation-only story — the erosion touched strong writers too, and compounded with age.
None of this means Australian writing outcomes are uniformly poor. The most recent national data, from the 2025 NAPLAN cycle, shows results broadly stable against 2023, with two in three students nationally at Strong or Exceeding across reading, numeracy and writing, and roughly one in ten needing additional support [WRI-09]. Writing was in fact the domain with the highest proportion of Year 9 students reaching the top 'Exceeding' band — 21.7%, ahead of numeracy at 11.9% [WRI-06]. The comparison that should worry a sentence-craft-focused tutor more is not the Writing domain score itself but the separate Grammar and Punctuation domain, where only 56.4% of Year 9 students reached Strong or above nationally — the lowest of any Year 9 literacy or numeracy domain measured that year [WRI-07]. Equity gaps persist too: Indigenous students are far more likely to need additional support than non-Indigenous peers (30.8% versus 7.6% in reading, across all year groups), though there is a genuine bright spot in writing specifically — the share of Year 9 Indigenous students reaching Exceeding rose from 4.3% to 6.6% between 2023 and 2025 [WRI-10].
The gender gap in writing is large and consistent, and it is worth naming plainly rather than softening. In 2025, Year 9 girls scored on average 35.3 NAPLAN scale-score points higher than boys in writing; 69.1% of girls reached Strong or above compared with 53.9% of boys — a gap of more than 15 percentage points; and 27.4% of girls reached Exceeding compared with 16.3% of boys [WRI-08]. This is not a small or noisy effect. Whatever combination of factors drives it, it is large enough that any writing-instruction approach aimed at raising the floor needs to reckon with the fact that a substantial share of boys nationally are not clearing the 'Strong' bar in the subject where the gender gap is widest.
The instructional evidence is where the picture becomes genuinely useful for a tutoring decision, and it complicates the instinct to simply do more writing. Graham and Perin's meta-analysis of adolescent writing instruction (142 studies, 176 effect sizes, Grades 4–12) found the largest effects came not from volume of writing but from how it was taught. Explicit strategy instruction in planning, revising and editing produced the largest average effect on writing quality of any intervention studied (effect size 0.82), and was even more effective for low-achieving students specifically (1.02) [WRI-11]. Teaching students to explicitly summarise texts had an equally large effect (0.82), though on a thinner evidence base of only four studies [WRI-13]. Sentence-combining — teaching students to build complex sentences by joining simple ones — produced a solid, moderate effect (0.50 overall, 0.46 for low-achieving students specifically) [WRI-12]. Grammar instruction, by contrast, had a small but statistically significant negative effect on writing quality, for the general population and for low-achieving students alike [WRI-14]. Put those two findings for grammar and sentence-combining side by side and a real distinction falls out: building sentences (sentence-combining) helps; grammar instruction as measured in this meta-analysis does not, and mildly hurts. This lines up with Berninger's earlier theoretical account of composition, which treats transcription (the mechanics of getting words onto the page) and working memory as the bottleneck constraining higher-order composing — and argues that fluency in the mechanics is what frees up capacity for the thinking [LRX-07]. AERO's own more recent writing-instruction model, released in 2025, leans on this literature too, citing Graham and colleagues' 2018 meta-analysis for the claim that increasing the amount of writing practice students undertake is key to their progress [LRX-03] — though writing researchers have publicly pushed back that AERO's newer framework leans too heavily on one strand of evidence (applied linguistics and genre theory) and underweights the broader instructional literature it once endorsed [LRX-05], and a separate methodological critique of the original 2022 decline report notes it presented no estimate of sampling error despite roughly 10% of the NAPLAN cohort not sitting the writing exam [LRX-04]. Both caveats are worth carrying alongside the headline findings, not instead of them.
What examiners see at the senior end of Australian schooling echoes the same distinction between craft and volume. VCE English assessors have repeatedly flagged that students lose marks not for writing too little but for writing without a plan: the 2024 assessment report names 'free writing' — starting to write without planning, given the limited exam time available — as a specific limiting strategy, alongside writing for oneself rather than for the reader and leaning on plot alone to carry ideas [VCE-07]. On the analytical side, the same reports describe students who 'tacked' quotes onto sentences as bare proof rather than embedding and analysing them, contrasted with stronger responses that selected textual evidence to support a considered reading [VCE-02]; and a formulaic structure — one paragraph per example, marching through 'proof' rather than analysing an author's ideas — as a specific and recurring weakness [VCE-08]. None of this is a volume problem. It is a strategy and planning problem, which is exactly what Graham and Perin's largest effect size targets.
What does this mean for a weekly writing session with a tutor? It argues against two common defaults: assigning more writing on the assumption that practice alone builds skill, and drilling grammar terminology on the assumption that naming parts of speech improves prose. The evidence favours something more deliberate — explicit, taught strategies for planning, drafting and revising, rehearsed enough times that a student can run them under exam pressure without reinventing the plan from scratch; sentence-combining exercises that build the syntactic control examiners are rewarding at the criterion level; and analytical writing practice that trains students to select and embed evidence rather than list it. Retrieval and spaced practice — rated high-utility learning techniques across ages and contexts in the wider cognitive-psychology literature — support returning to these same taught strategies repeatedly over weeks rather than covering them once and moving on [PRC-01][PRC-02]. The reassuring part of this picture is that it is not a story about ability or a lost generation. It is a story about which specific moves are being taught, and the data says those moves are learnable, with the largest effects recorded exactly where a tutor spends their time: planning before drafting, building better sentences, and revising with a strategy rather than a red pen.
Figure · from the registerYear 9 NAPLAN Writing, 2025 — the gender gap
Proportion of Year 9 students at each proficiency level, girls vs boys, NAPLAN Writing 2025 (national). Redrawn from the figures in #WRI-08.
Average NAPLAN Persuasive writing scores declined nationally from 2011 to 2018, with the decline more pronounced in the secondary years (Year 7 and Year 9) than in primary years.
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). This is true for overall writing scores as well as scores for a number of specific writing skills.
In the AERO NAPLAN writing analysis, most Year 9 students found it difficult to achieve the maximum score for the Text Structure criterion, and over a third scored poorly on Audience — indicating many Year 9 students are not developing the writing skills needed for senior secondary study.
Text structure: Most students in Year 9 (85%) are finding it challenging to score the maximum score of 4 in this criterion. ... Audience: Over one-third (38%) of Year 9 students achieved a score of 3 or less out of a possible 6 for the criterion addressing audience. This indicates the students have not developed a broad understanding of how to support, engage and persuade the reader through writing, a skill required for senior secondary study.
For secondary NAPLAN writing (Years 7 and 9), the specific criteria that showed measurable decline over the decade were Punctuation, Sentence Structure, and Vocabulary; for primary years (3 and 5) the criteria that declined most were Text Structure and Persuasive Devices. Spelling was the only criterion that improved.
For primary students (Years 3 and 5), the criteria that saw the most decline were Text Structure and Persuasive Devices. For secondary students (Years 7 and 9), the criteria that deteriorated over time were Punctuation, Sentence Structure, and Vocabulary. Patterns for other criteria were less clear. The only criterion that saw improvement was Spelling. Average student achievement in Spelling in NAPLAN Persuasive writing tasks improved between 2011 and 2018 for Year 7 and 9 students and remained consistent for Year 3 and Year 5 students.
The gap in NAPLAN writing achievement between low- and high-achieving students widened as students progressed through year levels, for overall writing skill and most individual writing criteria; and the proportion of high-achieving students scoring top marks on most Persuasive writing criteria (except Spelling) also decreased over the decade.
There has been a decline in the writing performance of high-achieving students in Persuasive writing performance over time. Specifically, the percentage of Year 5, 7 and 9 students who achieve a high NAPLAN score for all criteria (except for Spelling), has decreased. The gap between low- and high-achieving students widened for overall writing skills and most individual writing criteria as students progressed through year levels.
NAPLAN Narrative writing performance (a separate genre from Persuasive, assessed 2016/2019/2021) was comparatively stable to slightly improved over that shorter window, in contrast to the clear decline seen in Persuasive writing -- so AERO's 'writing decline' finding is specific to persuasive writing, not writing overall.
An initial visual inspection of the average writing score in Narrative writing in 2016, 2019 and 2021 (Figure 6) ... revealed that the overall Narrative writing performance slightly improved for the Year 3 cohort from 2016 to 2021 ... For Year 5 and 7 cohorts, the average writing performance slightly declined between 2016 and 2019 but improved (particularly for the Year 7 cohort) between 2019 and 2021, however, none of the improvement between 2019 and 2021 was statistically significant. ... The overall writing performance remained stable for the Year 9 cohort.
In the 2025 NAPLAN cycle, nationally 21.7% of Year 9 students achieved the top 'Exceeding' proficiency band in Writing (the highest of any domain for that year level), while national writing results were broadly stable compared to 2023.
On average across domains, 17.1% of Year 9 students achieved results in the Exceeding proficiency level, ranging from 11.9% in numeracy to 21.7% in writing.
In the 2025 NAPLAN cycle, a substantial minority of Year 9 students nationally were below the 'Strong' proficiency level in grammar and punctuation: only 56.4% achieved 'Strong' or above in grammar and punctuation, the lowest of any Year 9 literacy/numeracy domain that year.
On average across domains, 64.0% of Year 9 students achieved results in the Strong proficiency level or above, ranging from 56.4% in grammar and punctuation to 71.9% in spelling.
Nationally in 2025, girls substantially outperformed boys in NAPLAN Writing at both Year 7 and Year 9: in Year 9, 69.1% of girls achieved 'Strong' or above in writing versus 53.9% of boys, a gap of over 15 percentage points; girls scored on average 35.3 NAPLAN scale-score points higher than boys in Year 9 writing.
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.
Nationally in 2025, one in ten (approximately 9-10%) of Australian students across all year groups and domains were at the 'Needs additional support' proficiency level, while two out of three students were at 'Strong' or 'Exceeding' for reading, numeracy and writing.
Latest data from the 2025 NAPLAN assessments show that performance is broadly stable at a national level, with 2 out of 3 students at the "Strong" or "Exceeding" proficiency level for their reading, numeracy and writing skills, and one in 10 students at the "Needs additional support" level across all year groups and domains.
Indigenous students nationally are much more likely to need additional support in literacy/numeracy than non-Indigenous students: across all year groups, around one in three Indigenous students (30.8%) are in the 'Needs additional support' level in reading, versus fewer than one in ten (7.6%) non-Indigenous students. However, there was a reportable improvement 2023-2025 in the percentage of Indigenous students achieving 'Exceeding' in writing at both Year 7 and Year 9.
Nationally, a higher proportion of Indigenous students need additional support compared to the overall student population. For example, across all year groups: in reading, around one in 3 Indigenous students (30.8%) are in the "Needs additional support" level, while fewer than one in 10 non-Indigenous students (7.6%) fall into that proficiency level... There is some evidence of improved performance among the strongest cohort of Year 9 Indigenous students, particularly in writing, with the percentage of those achieving the Exceeding level increasing from 4.3% in 2023 to 6.6% in 2025.
In a meta-analysis of 142 experimental/quasi-experimental studies (yielding 176 effect sizes) of adolescent (Grade 4-12) writing instruction, explicit strategy instruction for planning, revising and editing produced the largest average effect on writing quality (weighted effect size 0.82), and was especially effective for low-achieving students (effect size 1.02).
1. Writing strategies (ES overall=0.82, n=20; ES for low achieving students=1.02, n=9). Writing strategy instruction, as defined here, refers to specific instruction in planning, revising, and editing. Strategy instruction is an explicit method that involves teaching the sequence of steps necessary to complete a larger task.
In the same Writing Next meta-analysis, sentence combining instruction -- teaching students to build more complex sentences by combining simple ones -- produced a moderate, statistically significant effect on writing quality (effect size 0.50), with a near-identical effect (0.46) in the one study focused on low-achieving students.
6. Sentence combining (ES=0.50, n=5). This intervention taught students to improve the quality of their writing by crafting more complex sentences. Students were taught to combine two simple sentences into one. ... In the one study that focused on low-achieving students, the effect was 0.46, very similar to the overall effect.
In the Writing Next meta-analysis, teaching students explicit summarization strategies produced a large effect on writing quality (effect size 0.82, tied with strategy instruction for the single largest effect of the 11 instructional elements reviewed), based on 4 studies.
2. Summarization (ES overall=0.82, n=4). The use of this strategy teaches students to write summaries of existing passages by explicit instruction in a summarization process and by providing models of well-written summaries for students to emulate.
In the Writing Next meta-analysis, grammar instruction had a small but statistically significant negative effect on writing quality, both for the general student population and for low-achieving students specifically. (Note: the cited synopsis does not itself specify whether this refers to isolated/traditional grammar instruction as distinct from sentence-combining or other grammar-adjacent interventions -- that distinction is well-established in the broader Writing Next literature but should not be asserted as stated by this specific source.)
Grammar instruction was found to have a small but statistically significant negative effect on writing quality, both across all students and with only low-achieving students.
In a synthesis of studies examining how writing practices affect reading, students who wrote about texts they had read showed an average weighted effect size of approximately 0.40 standard deviations on published standardized/norm-referenced reading comprehension tests (based on 11 studies) -- a separate, higher effect size of 0.51 was found on researcher-designed tests (50 studies).
The effect size for writing about text that was read (0.40) exceeded each of these effects, providing additional validation of its effectiveness as a tool for improving students' reading comprehension. [Figure caption, same section: 'Average Weighted Effect Size = 0.40, Published Standardized/Norm-Referenced Tests (Based on 11 Studies)'; a second, higher effect size of 0.51 is reported separately for researcher-designed tests based on 50 studies.]
Australia's average PISA 2022 reading score (498) was well above the OECD average (476); 79% of Australian 15-year-olds reached at least Level 2 reading proficiency (OECD average 74%), and 12% reached the top proficiency bands (Level 5+), versus an OECD average of 7%.
Australia's 15-year-olds scored 498 points in reading compared to an average of 476 points in OECD countries... 79% of students in Australia attained Level 2 or higher in reading (OECD average: 74%), and 12% of students scored at Level 5 or higher in reading (OECD average: 7%).
In PIRLS 2021 (Year 4 international reading literacy assessment), Australia's average score (540) was statistically similar to PIRLS 2016 (544) and higher than PIRLS 2011 (527); 80% of Australian Year 4 students met the PIRLS Intermediate ('proficient standard') benchmark or above, including 14% at the Advanced benchmark.
Australia's average score of 540 points in PIRLS 2021 was statistically similar to the average score in PIRLS 2016 (544 points) and remains higher than the average score for 2011 (527 points). 80% of year 4 students in Australia met the proficient standard (the PIRLS Intermediate benchmark), including 14% at the Advanced benchmark and 34% at the High benchmark.
A more recent (post-2010) Graham meta-analysis exists and is directly cited by AERO: Graham, Liu, Aitken, Ng, Bartlett, Harris & Holzapfel (2018), 'Effectiveness of literacy programs balancing reading and writing instruction: A meta-analysis,' Reading Research Quarterly, 53(3), 279-304, cited by AERO as evidence that increasing writing practice improves student outcomes.
5 Graham, S., Liu, X., Aitken, A., Ng, C., Bartlett, B., Harris, K. R., & Holzapfel, J. (2018). Effectiveness of literacy programs balancing reading and writing instruction: A meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 53(3), 279-304. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.194
A 2022 EduResearch Matters/AARE blog critique argues AERO's NAPLAN writing-decline report ('Writing development: What does a decade of NAPLAN data reveal?') should be disregarded because it presents no estimates of sampling error, despite roughly 10% of the population not sitting the NAPLAN writing exam (introducing known non-random sampling error), a standard practice ACARA itself follows in its own NAPLAN technical reports.
There are two lines of technical concern which need to be noted. These concerns reveal reasons why this report should be disregarded – and why media response is a beatup... The fact these are estimates is not apparent in the current report. There is NO presentation of any of the estimates of error in the data used in this report... In this case, we know about 10% of the population do not sit the NAPLAN writing exam, so we already know there is sampling error... So, what does this persuasive writing report say about sampling error? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero.
A July 2025 EduResearch Matters/AARE critique argues AERO's School Writing Instruction Framework (SWIF) is based on a narrow subset of evidence (applied linguistics/genre theory only), disregarding AERO's own prior 2022 acknowledgement that 'no single pedagogy adequately addresses all aspects' of writing, and ignoring recent meta-analyses of nearly 1,000 writing-instruction studies that recommend an integrative approach.
While there are a number of positives in this model and its accompanying practice resources, we argue here that these are based largely on a subset of evidence. It dismisses significant bodies of work with demonstrated impact on student writing achievement. Paradoxically, these were at the core of AERO's previous documentation... In its 2022 review of instructional approaches to writing AERO rightly claimed, “no single pedagogy adequately addresses all aspects of the knowledge, skills and strategies required for skilled writing”. The major pitfall of SWIF is its overwhelming focus on one of these approaches, applied linguistics. There is a total disregard for the most recent and compelling writing instruction recommendations based on meta-analyses of nearly one thousand studies in writing instruction.
Cite any finding by its anchor — for example #WRI-01 — and the link resolves to the claim, quote and source above. The verification protocol lives on the register’s main page.
