Audio

Title: Writing skills at all time low
Author: ABC News June 26 2025
Size: 2713 kb

Schools are being encouraged to teach writing across all subject areas, including math, science and even PE to address a long term decline in skills.

[speaker] from the Australian Education Research Organization (AERO) says schools need to be doing more explicit teaching.

AERO rep:

So AERO has been focused on writing for a few years now, and done a lot of literature reviews and some analysis of NAPLAN data, and some of that NAPLAN data has shown us that actually writing skills have declined since 2011 and in particular year seven to year nine, have particularly declined.

But there are many different reasons for this, and there's a lot of pointing and blame shifting, but what we do know is that one thing that can really help stem that decline is the explicit and systematic teaching of writing. People aren't born good writers. We have to be able to teach them really quickly. What are the rules of the game? What's the languages that they need to be using, what's the purpose that they need to be writing about? And that is something that could only really be done really explicitly in school. So explicit teaching is really, honestly, just should be called Teaching.

It's when we identify, well, here's what students need to know and need to be able to do. And let's get in there and actually say, here's what you should be doing, and teaching students, really to believe this is what maybe, for example, when it comes to grammar, here what the building blocks of language are. Here's how to put sentences together. Here's how to make sentences that meet the purposes that you're trying to communicate. All of that stuff has to be explicitly taught.

We can't just sort of give students writing and hope that they could copy it and become you know, the next Hemingway. Writing is incredibly critical. It's not just really helpful for collaboration, for critical thinking, for deepening our understanding of subjects, but it's actually just incredibly exciting to be able to write persuasively, and creatively, and that's what we want for all of Australia's children.