In what has been a bumper period for Civics and Citizenship Education (CCE) in Australia, the NAP-CC report for 2024 was released this week, and immediately caused an uproar, as it indicated that the percentage of Australian students meeting the level of proficient had fallen (from what were already pretty low levels). This marks a significant change in previous versions of the NAP-CC, going back to 2004, when the test was instituted. Largely speaking, the results have stayed poor – bad in Year 6, worse in Year 10 – since 2004, but the most recent version has fallen 10 percentage points. There are probably many reasons for this, and of course, the bare statistics don’t tell us those reasons. I’ve had a look through the report, and thought I would share some thoughts and comments. Gratifyingly, I’ve also been approached by some traditional media outfits, as well as radio stations, to talk about this topic. So, what do I think:
- It’s bad, and perhaps now it’s time to panic
The results, as I said before, have been bad for a while. Now they’re terrible. In year 6, only 43% of students were proficient. In Year 10, only 28% were. And this is proficient – not excellent, not at the top of the scale.
2. Some interesting details
While the overall results are poor, it’s worth noting some of the long term trends remained the same:
- Metro outperformed rural and regional
- Girls outperformed boys (although not significantly in Year 10)
- ACT was on top.
- Those with parents in professional roles outperformed those with parents in manual positions.
- And those who had the chance to participate in civic activities, both in school and out of school, outperformed those who did not.
There was one surprising bit of news, though:
- Those from NESB outperformed those from ESB. I think this is fascinating – it’s changed from previous years, but it does hold true to the (anecdotal) discussions that new arrivals to Australia value the democratic process more highly. This one is definitely worth further examination.
3. It’s still just a test of literacy
The question items are questions that test civic literacy. There are a couple of different domains that are tested – diversity, rules and laws, democracy and so on – and I think these are important to gather some baseline data on. There is also an attempt to test some of the skills deemed to be related to CCE – reasoning, questioning, critical thinking and so on. But what it doesn’t (and can’t?) test is how likely young people are to make use of these skills. While we can consider their attitudes towards protest, we can’t actually determine if they would be likely to engage in civil action or protest. So we’re really only ticking the ‘informed’ box of our goals for schooling (if that).
4. The media cops a hiding
While trust remained high in civic institutions, there had been a decline in trust in the media. I thought this was interesting, because young people were increasingly getting their news from the internet – but I want to know more about that. Are they getting it from, for example, abc.net.au, or are they getting it from Instagram? The internet is not the same as social media, and some more precision about this question would have been really interesting.
5. Sharing content makes you less literate.
Another factoid that fascinated me was the idea that, while those students who used the internet for news had higher scores, those who tended to ‘frequently share content about political or social issues’ had lower scores. So does this mean engagement hurts?
I’ll dig into the data, especially the technical report, when it comes out.