The drop is real, and it is worse in the secondary 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).
AERO (2022), Writing development report. Registered as WRI-01.

Two things are worth separating here immediately. The decline is national and it is over a decade — it is not something that happened to your child at their school. And it is specific to persuasive writing: in the same report, narrative writing did not follow the same path, with Year 3 slightly improving and Year 9 remaining stable (WRI-05). “Writing is in decline” is too broad a sentence to be true.

What actually slipped: two named criteria

This is the useful part. NAPLAN writing is marked against ten criteria, and AERO reported where Year 9 students sit on two of them.

Text structure — did not reach the top score of 4

85%

Audience — scored 3 or less out of 6

38%

Figure 1Year 9 performance on two NAPLAN writing criteria, as reported by AERO. AERO, Writing development report, 2022.

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.
AERO (2022). Registered as WRI-02 in the evidence register.

Read that 85% carefully, because the natural misreading makes it far more alarming than it is. It does not mean 85% of Year 9 students are failing at text structure. It means 85% did not reach the top score of 4 out of 4. Those are very different claims, and a page that blurred them would be doing the thing this site exists not to do.

Why Year 7 is where it shows

Nothing about a child’s ability collapses over one summer. What changes is the demand. Primary school writing rewards a piece that has a beginning, a middle and an end, spelled well enough to read. Secondary writing asks for something structurally different: an argument held across paragraphs, aimed at a reader who might disagree.

Those are exactly the two criteria AERO names. Text structure is whether the piece is built; audience is whether it knows who it is talking to. A child can be a strong primary writer — fluent, imaginative, accurate — and have been asked for neither of them until Year 7.

It is also the point at which the gap in grammar and punctuation widens rather than closes, which is the subject of a separate page, and the year level where the spread between students grows fastest.

What to do about it

Stop asking for more writing. Ask for closer reading of less writing. Neither criterion improves through volume. Structure improves when someone shows a student why their third paragraph should have been their first.
Look at a whole piece, not a sentence. Text structure is invisible at sentence level. Read one of their essays and ask: could you state its argument in one sentence? If not, that is the thing to work on, and it is teachable in weeks.
Ask who they think they are writing for.Most Year 7 students answer “the teacher”. The audience criterion is about writing for a reader who has to be persuaded, which is a different job and one nobody has usually explained.
Read the criteria yourself. The NAPLAN writing test, explained sets out all ten and what each rewards. They are public, and they are more specific than most school feedback.

Bring one piece of their writing.

A twenty-minute discovery call — what the writing is actually doing, which of the two things has slipped, and what would move it. Free, and without obligation.

Sentence-level work, free to read — the writing clinic →