Australia’s intense focus on nationwide numeracy and literacy test scores such as NAPLAN has made almost no difference to students’ measurable literacy and numeracy over time and comes at the expense of “values education”, says Dr Chris Duncan, CEO of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia (AHISA). “I think the model has been very damaging, and the more emphasis we’ve put on performance, the worse we seem to do,” he says, adding that the more NAPLAN has become the “surrogate goal” of Australian schooling, the worse Australian students appear to perform. “To some degree, there are modest improvements in little pockets, in little areas and so on, but the general trend is down and flat-lining,” he says. “It’s quite confronting. When we didn’t have that emphasis on performance, we did a lot better.”
Schools with a strong faith or philosophical base offer a values-based education, Duncan says, adding that values education focuses on what things mean, how they can be evaluated, and how to make critical judgements. “What does the world mean? What does it mean for you?” he adds. “I’m not arguing a particular set of values. But whether it’s faith-based schools – Catholic or Anglican or Christadelphian or Islamic or Jewish – or whether they’re Steiner or Montessori, they either have a very strong faith base or a strong philosophical base about values.”
Students at Waverley College in Sydney’s east are given concrete reasons for working hard at foundational skills such as literacy and numeracy, and at the same time they are explicitly taught about the importance of values such as empathy.
“We give students learning examples in the classroom or in the real world when they’re engaging with community, or in our well-being program, where we actually explicitly teach what values like what it means to have empathy or what it means to be a citizen who has an interest in the well-being of the world,” says Lynsey Porter, Waverley College deputy principal – teaching and learning.
She noted a particular example: a group of Waverley students last year launched the school’s first ecology symposium, with students from ten other schools attending and First Nations experts and government speakers discussing sustainability.
Via this symposium, the organising students researched and absorbed knowledge about sustainability, and the school’s literacy coordinator then taught them how to craft well-written and effective emails they could send to local businesses. These student emails suggested important steps that these businesses could take to improve their sustainability practices.
About 1500 day boys in years 5 to 12 attend the Catholic school, and Porter says experiences such as the symposium help students understand the real value of literacy as the foundation of effective communication. “Having that purpose, it really helps them to engage in the question: ‘why do you have to be able to build your literacy skills and be able to craft that letter?’,” she says.
Porter says it is important to “strike a balance” with values and foundational skills. “The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report 2025 is telling us employers really want those values like empathy and character resilience and early-offer schemes from some universities are asking students to provide descriptions of when they’ve demonstrated those particular values,” she adds.
Dr Rebecca Marrone, a lecturer in learning sciences and development at the University of South Australia, has researched secondary students’ “engagement” in education, defined as students’ connectedness to adults at their school, their sense of belonging, their emotional and cognitive involvement with both teachers and peers and how this engagement was linked to academic outcomes.
She and her colleagues assessed data from the South Australian Well-being and Engagement Collection survey (WEC) of 215,000 South Australian students from 2016 to 2019. “I think our findings show that academic outcomes are not just about academic content, but also students’ relationships, the climate, sense of meaning and values – that is the connection to values-based education,” she says.
Her research supports the idea that emotionally-safe, inclusive, value-driven schools and environments have a positive impact on students’ educational experience, Marrone says. “Academic success is deeply intertwined with students’ emotional, social, and motivational experiences inside and outside of school,” she adds.
For his part, AHISA CEO Duncan says in the early 2000s, before the “unbridled focus” on performance scores began, Australian students did well in International Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) tests in maths, reading and science.
The OECD’s Program of International Assessment (PISA), which tests 15-year-olds from nations around the world every three years, has since found a slump in Australian students’ maths skills. Between 2003, when mathematical literacy was first assessed as a major domain, and 2022, Australia’s average score declined by 37 points – for girls the dip was 41 points and for boys 34 points.
“If you go back to the early 2000s and look where we were on PISA in literacy, numeracy and science, we’re up with the top five OECD countries in the world,” Duncan says, noting that back then, Australian education was far more values-based than it is now.
Duncan has researched values education with a colleague and in 2019 published a scholarly paper comparing a “values-embedded” model of schooling with a performance-based one, and concluding a combination is preferable – one “that is thoroughly values-embedded, concerned with the educational well-being of each child, while also giving value to and prioritising educational performance and achievement, and the intellectual liberation these can offer each and every child.”
A large amount of work on values education was originally undertaken in Australian government schools, Duncan says, adding the researchers asked schools “to articulate their value propositions”, and children and adolescents were asked to consider questions about their values. “Questions such as ‘what are my values? What do I value? What does my family value? What does my community value? What should I hope for?’,” he says. “Questions like that are thinking exercises; there’s extensive literature on the way values education is taught.”
Before the May federal election, AHISA released a discussion paper titled “A new narrative for Australian schooling: a prompt for public debate about purpose and approach”.
The discussion paper noted that in July 2024, the Commonwealth announced the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement (BFSA) to replace the National Schools Reform Agreement (NSRA), which expired at the end of last year.
The Productivity Commission’s 2022 review of the NSRA found it had “done little to improve student outcomes”. The new BFSA, the paper says, has new funding arrangements to improve student results and provide more support for particular groups of students, but Australia needs “a refreshed narrative about the purposes of Australian schooling”.
Duncan says he thinks many people in education are apprehensive about projecting one value or preference over another, whereas values education should have a broader foundation.
“It’s getting kids to think critically,” he says. “It’s getting kids to step back and think about the context in which they live and how they’re related to people, and what’s important. At the end of the day, education ought to be a process of what I call moral inquiry.”