ADJOURNMENT

Ms McKENZIE (Flinders) (19:40): Overnight, the Programme for International Student Assessment 2025 report was released from the OECD in Paris. PISA, as it is known, is the most important benchmark for global performance in education. Importantly, this report measures the period after the great disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, but, equally, it captures the beginning of the even greater disruption of generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude in the classroom.

The results for Australia this year are devastating. Indeed, in both maths and reading, they are the worst results we have received since testing began at the start of this century. Our kids are now about two years behind where they were 20 years ago, despite record funding.

While we still remain higher than the OECD average, we are declining at a rapid rate from where we have been in the past, and we now sit persistently well below the top performers of China, Singapore, Japan, Korea and Estonia. In science, 40 per cent of our kids are not at the nationally proficient standard. In reading, 45 per cent of our kids are not at the nationally proficient standard and 23 per cent are low performers.

In maths, 51 per cent of our kids are not at the nationally proficient standard and a huge 29 per cent are considered low performers. When you drill down into the Australian results more, you find even more concerning data. Only 52 per cent of boys attained the nationally proficient standard in maths, and the figure was 45 per cent for girls.

Even more concerning is the revelation that 28 per cent of male students are low performers in reading, versus 18 per cent for girls. Put plainly, about a third of our boys lack the foundational competencies for full participation in further learning, the workforce and civic life in the 21st century. In my maiden speech in this place almost four years ago, I raised concerns about reading.

Back then, the OECD had found that the vast majority of boys and almost half of our girls only read if they have to. I put forward a caution to my colleagues in this place: Everyone here should be concerned for a generation which will one day take its place on these green leather benches without having read The Lord of the Flies, 1984, If This is a Man and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Two months later, ChatGPT was set loose on the world, and I began to wonder if any child would ever bother to pick up a book again. This brings me to what is particularly interesting about this year's PISA results. This year, PISA makes important observations about the impact of screens and digital devices on education.

The OECD is now presenting real data on the impact of digital devices. I thank Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills, and Tia Loukkola, Head of Innovation, who met with me at the OECD in April 2023 to talk through this exact issue of whether digital devices were distracting children from learning and affecting their capacity for concentration.

This year's report found that 46 per cent of students in OECD countries use AI, like ChatGPT or Claude, weekly to help them learn, and it's slightly higher in Australia at the rate of 50 per cent. It found that 28 per cent of students in OECD countries say their fellow students are distracted by the use of digital devices during most science classes or every science class, but this is massively higher in Australia at the rate of 39 per cent.

The OECD found that 48 per cent of 15-year-olds spend around two hours a day in digital leisure, 29 per cent spend between two and four hours a day and 23 per cent are excessively consuming digital leisure for more than four hours a day. Interestingly, almost 40 per cent of boys are doing more than three hours of gaming each and every day. The report found that students read faster but less accurately on digital devices, and that declining levels of reading for enjoyment and a rapid shift to digital reading may have compromised young people's ability to engage with more complex information.

It also found that smartphones and AI chatbots were accelerating a global educational decline that is robbing students of the ability to concentrate, interpret and reason. Pisa 2026 also shows that students who use AI for specific schoolwork tasks, such as summarising texts, drafting or conducting research, attain lower scores in science than students who do not use AI, and students who do not use AI outperform those who do on average by around 20 points, equivalent to being around one year of schooling ahead of their peers.

While I commend the OECD for zooming in on the impact of digital devices and a digital leisure diet on our educational performance, I call upon the government to act immediately before it is too late. It is now three years since I convened the Screens and Gaming Alliance national meeting here in Canberra, which warned policymakers that too much screen exposure was a threat to Australia's educational future, a threat now well and truly borne out in this data.