New findings from the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) have revealed that one-third of Year 9 students in Australia are now writing at a primary school level—evidence of what researchers describe as a “30-year policy failure.”
While this decline has prompted urgent calls for intervention, experts warn against treating writing as merely a metric to fix. “Writing is not a singular skill but a social, cultural, and critical capability,” the report notes, urging schools, families, and communities to co-author change across languages, media, and traditions.
A narrow focus has led to ‘orphaned writing’
The current focus on standardised testing, particularly through NAPLAN, has resulted in a classroom culture where checklists outweigh creativity. Educators say that with punctuation and paragraph structure dominating assessment rubrics, students’ voice and identity are being sidelined. Combined with a crowded curriculum and the pressure of league tables, writing risks becoming everyone’s responsibility but no one’s priority.
Tools for change: new frameworks and beyond
AERO’s new School Writing Instruction Framework (SWIF) offers practical support: structured grammar sequences and evidence-based teaching strategies. While these tools are crucial, the report emphasises that they are “necessary but not sufficient.”
“These tools are a vital floor: all students deserve to know how a complex sentence works and why a paragraph needs an idea thread,” the report states. “But what will make them fly is the ceiling—the imaginative, intercultural and critical layers that help young writers want to write.”
Six levers for long-term transformation
The report outlines six key strategies to broaden writing instruction. These include identity-rich tasks such as co-authoring bilingual books with elders, cross-disciplinary projects like science-based storytelling, and AI-aware pedagogy that teaches students to challenge bias in chatbot-generated text.
Pilot programs are already underway. At Marrung Primary in Victoria, students are composing stories in both English and Yorta Yorta through Koorie partnerships. Meanwhile, a school in the Northern Territory is blending science data with narrative fiction, and a WA school is inviting parents to edit student work in bilingual cafés.
Beyond benchmarks: writing as identity
The report concludes with a call for national policy change, including more funding for cross-disciplinary training and publication pipelines to showcase student work.
“When students see writing as identity work, civic work and creative work, they chase mastery because the page has become a place where they matter,” the report says.