Issue 138

The results of the 2025 NAP-ICT have just been published and they don’t make good reading. Based on 10,000 Australian Year 6 and Year 10 students, they show that while students are spending more time on devices, their digital literacy is at the lowest levels since testing began in 2005.

In a report by the ABC, Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) CEO Stephen Gniel is quoted as saying, ‘The 2025 results show a decline in student proficiency in ICT literacy and continuing gaps between different groups of students.’ He continued, ‘It’s our lowest levels since testing began in 2005. We can see the kids are using devices more and more [but] that’s not translating into them having the proficiency skills that they need.’ Professor Therese Keane, a former ICT high school teacher, suggests, ‘You have to be able to make sure you can use systems critically and safely. You have to understand the bias and manipulation.’ Sound familiar? It’s probably something that you try to do every day, between all the other tasks you’re doing to keep the library functioning. That should be the core role of trained teacher librarians but without them, how can we expect students to learn digital literacy?

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has said, ‘It begs the question: what is going on here?’ He has charged Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) to investigate the results. I hope the AERO team consider the correlation between the decline in trained teacher librarians in our schools and the decline in student proficiency in ICT literacy. Mandating for, and guaranteeing, funding of teacher librarians in every school nationally would be a good start, Minister Clare. I know I’m preaching to the converted but it shouldn’t require another Karmel report to understand the key role school libraries and teacher librarians play in (digital) literacy.

You can read the ABC report here.

This issue of Connections is focusing on books and stories. As a lover of both, I am often immersed in numerous worlds at one time, learning more about people and their lives.

Have a wonderful Term 3.