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Contribution to Book
Australia: PISA Australia—Excellence and Equity?
Improving a Country’s Education: PISA 2018 Results in 10 Countries (2020)
  • Sue Thomson, Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER)
Abstract
Australia’s education system reflects its history of federalism. State and territory governments are responsible for administering education within their jurisdiction and across the sector comprising government (public), Catholic systemic and other independent schooling systems. They collaborate on education policy with the federal government. Over the past two decades the federal government has taken a greater role in funding across the education sector, and as a result of this involvement and the priorities of federal governments of the day, Australia now has one of the highest rates of non-government schooling in the OECD. Funding equity across the sectors has become a prominent issue. Concerns have been compounded by evidence of declining student performance since Australia’s initial participation in PISA in 2000, and the increasing gap between our high achievers and low achievers. This chapter explores Australia’s PISA 2018 results and what they reveal about the impact of socioeconomic level on student achievement. It also considers the role of school funding and the need to direct support to those schools that are attempting to educate the greater proportion of an increasingly diverse student population including students facing multiple layers of disadvantage.
Keywords
  • International programs,
  • Tests,
  • Academic achievement,
  • School systems,
  • School funds,
  • Educational equity (Finance),
  • Achievement level
Publication Date
November, 2020
Editor
Nuno Crato
Publisher
Springer
ISBN
978-3-030-59031-4
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59031-4_2
Publisher Statement
This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
Citation Information
Thomson, S. (2021). Australia: PISA Australia—Excellence and Equity? In: N. Crato (Eds.), Improving a Country’s Education (pp.25-47). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59031-4_2