A new report suggests writing abilities among Australian students are slipping. 

New analysis by the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) shows a dramatic slide in students' writing ability over the past seven years.

The majority of Australia's Year 9 students are currently using punctuation at a Year 3 level, while results for persuasive writing assessment over the 2011-2018 period declined in all areas apart from spelling.

Student writing scores are consistently lower than expected of their year level. They are not writing as well as students once could in the same year level, nor as well as our curriculum says they should, and older students are experiencing the sharpest decline. 

AERO chief executive Jenny Donovan says high schools are sliding the most.

“Students' writing achievement has been declining fairly consistently across most of the aspects of writing that are assessed, and that decline is particularly bad for students who are in secondary schools,” she said. 

AERO’s analysis focused on persuasive writing tasks undertaken as part of the NAPLAN tests. The ability to write a coherent argument is an important life skill.  

Students have become less proficient at most of the persuasive writing skills assessed, but there has been a particular decline in writing sentences. Fewer than half of Year 9 students are proficient in sentence structure, dropping from 58 per cent in 2011 to 42 per cent in 2018.  

The full report is accessible here.