Australia’s reading results should concern all of us
By Melanie Smith, General Manager, Dymocks Children’s Charities
The latest PISA results should make us stop and pay attention.
Australian 15-year-olds have recorded our lowest reading result since the international assessment began. While Australia remains above the OECD average, our reading score has continued to fall, dropping another seven points since 2022.¹
But perhaps the most important finding isn’t where Australia sits on an international ranking.
It’s what is happening to reading itself.
Across OECD countries, reading has experienced the largest decline of the major learning areas over the past decade. The OECD describes the global reading results as the most concerning of the 2025 findings. Reading performance declined significantly in three-quarters of education systems with comparable data between 2018 and 2025.¹
Students are particularly struggling with longer texts and the kinds of reading that require sustained attention, critical thinking and the ability to bring together different pieces of information. At the same time, the incidence of what PISA calls ‘hasty reading’, moving quickly through information but getting it wrong, has almost doubled since 2018.¹
In an age of endless scrolling, short-form content and AI-generated information, that matters enormously.
Reading isn’t simply another subject we measure at school. As the OECD puts it, “reading is the gateway through which most academic learning passes.” ¹
A child needs to understand language before they can interpret a maths problem, analyse a historical source or understand a science experiment. Increasingly, they also need strong reading skills to work out whether the information being presented to them is credible at all.
That makes another part of the PISA findings particularly important: falling rates of reading for enjoyment.
Too often, reading for pleasure is treated as a nice extra. Something worthwhile once the ‘real’ work of teaching literacy has been done.
But children do not become confident readers only during literacy lessons. Reading regularly, choosing books they are interested in and having books around them all create opportunities to practise the skills that reading requires.
Children who read because they want to are spending more time with words, ideas and stories. They are building vocabulary and comprehension. They are learning to concentrate for longer periods, follow more complex ideas, make connections and interpret meaning.
So when we talk about encouraging children to read for pleasure, we are not talking about something frivolous. We are talking about helping children build the habit of reading.
And this is not solely a problem for schools to solve.
Reading starts at home, often long before a child enters a classroom. Reading together, talking about books, visiting a library and simply making time for reading all matter. Parents do not need expensive resources or specialist knowledge to help build a reader. What matters is creating opportunities for children to read and showing them that reading has value beyond a school assignment.
For many families, however, access to books cannot be assumed. That makes the role of schools and community organisations even more important.
Earlier this year, Dymocks Children’s Charities looked at applications from 384 schools in the bottom 25 per cent of Australia’s ICSEA rankings, representing more than 106,000 students.
What we found was confronting.
One in five of those schools had no dedicated library budget at all. Forty-three per cent had less than $1,000 a year to spend on their library collections. Some were trying to engage children with collections containing books from the 1970s and 1980s.²
For children in these communities, access to books cannot be taken for granted.
That matters when we look at another part of the PISA results. Socio-economic background remains strongly associated with educational achievement. Disadvantaged students continue to perform substantially below their more advantaged peers.
There is an interesting, and troubling, shift within that data. The reading gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students has narrowed in recent years, but not because disadvantaged students have caught up. Across the OECD, the most advantaged students experienced the largest decline in reading performance between 2018 and 2025.¹
That should concern us for two different reasons.
We have a broad problem with young people’s relationship with reading. But we also have children who were already behind and remain there, often without access to the same resources and opportunities as their peers.
And these problems do not suddenly emerge when a child reaches 15.
PISA’s comparison with international primary school assessments suggests that much of the later decline in reading was already apparent at younger ages. The report points to early reading development, children’s home environments and earlier schooling as part of the picture. ¹
That is also where we have an opportunity.
The scale of the PISA results can make this problem feel overwhelming. I don’t think it needs to be.
We know many of the things that help children become readers.
They need strong literacy teaching. They need adults who read with them and encourage them to read. They need time to read. They need access to books that are current, engaging and appropriate for them. And importantly, they need choice in what they read.
None of those things is particularly complicated.
Governments have an important responsibility to properly resource public schools and ensure a child’s postcode does not determine the quality of the books and literacy opportunities available to them.
But government isn’t the only answer.
Families can make reading part of everyday life. Schools can create cultures where reading is valued beyond assessment. Businesses and philanthropists can help close resource gaps that should not exist in the first place. And organisations like Dymocks Children’s Charities can continue getting books into the hands of children and into school libraries where they are needed most.
We know this can work. Every year, Dymocks Children’s Charities works with hundreds of schools across Australia, providing children with books of their own and helping schools rebuild library collections that have been under-resourced for years.
But hundreds more schools are still asking for help.
That is the part of these PISA results I don’t want us to lose sight of. Australia’s reading performance is going backwards, but this isn’t a problem without solutions.
The 2025 PISA results tell us where our young people are at 15. They should also prompt us to think much earlier.
If we want young Australians who can concentrate, comprehend, question what they read and navigate an increasingly complex information environment, we need to build readers from childhood.
And we already know where to start.
Sources
OECD, PISA 2025: Insights and Interpretations, Andreas Schleicher (2026).
Dymocks Children’s Charities, 2026 analysis of applications from 384 disadvantaged Australian schools.