Leaning too far? PISA, policy and Australia's ‘top five’ ambitions

Australia has declared its ambition to be within the ‘top five’ in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by 2025. So serious is it about this ambition, that the Australian Government has incorporated it into the Australian Education Act, 2013. Given this focus on PISA results and rankings, we go beyond average scores to take a close look at Australia’s performance in PISA, examining rankings by different geographical units, by item content and by test completion. Based on this analysis and using data from interviews with measurement and policy experts, we show how uninformative and even misleading the ‘average performance scores’, on which the rankings are based, can be. We explore how a more nuanced understanding would point to quite different policy actions. After considering the PISA data and Australia’s ‘top five’ ambition closely, we argue that neither the rankings nor such ambitions should be given much credence.