Australian Students Decline in Digital Literacy

Despite students spending significant time online and on devices Australian students have recorded their worst-ever results for digital literacy, with 37 per cent of year 10 students and 50 per cent of year 6 students assessed as proficient.

Australia has a generation of students who are highly digitally immersed but poorly digitally educated, taught by teachers who feel unprepared to teach the subject, in a curriculum that has no clear home for it, compounded by structural inequity that the test results reflect but that no amount of curriculum reform alone will fix.

LaTrobe Uni experts Professor Therese Keane, Dr Stefan Schutt and Dr Alexia Maddox say students are treating AI like Google - trusting outputs because they look credible, outsourcing thinking to an apparently authoritative source. It is the same behaviour we’ve seen with search engines and Wikipedia for two decades. AI is not in itself making students less capable. It’s feeding into existing patterns of time poverty, limited skill-building and assessment pressure.

Teachers need critical capacity, not tech expertise. They think they need to know the latest technology. What they actually need is the critical capacity to ask the right questions of their students. That reframes the entire narrative away from devices and platforms toward pedagogy and teacher preparation - where the lever actually is.

Year 6 and Year 10 students are at fundamentally different cognitive and social stages. Digital literacy teaching has to be developmentally responsive. One-size-fits-all approach will not work - and our curriculum is designed around exactly this understanding.

The curriculum expectation is contradictory, asking teachers to embed digital literacy meaningfully across all subjects without reducing anything else, and without the supports and preparation to do so which is problematic.

The 2025 Australian Digital Inclusion Index maps almost exactly the same populations as the NAP’s worst performers: Indigenous Australians, remote communities, low-income and public housing households. These are students coming to school from households where 40.9 per cent of First Nations people are digitally excluded, where families are cutting back on food to stay connected, and where mobile-only prepaid access runs out before the end of the month. You cannot solve digital literacy at the classroom level when infrastructure, affordability and foundational digital ability are not there at home.

The expert panel believes we need to Teach ICT literacy deliberately, across schooling, put more emphasis on digital media creation, not just consumption and strengthen digital safety, privacy, and AI literacy.

Image by Jakub Zerdzicki