Australia's results in the international PISA test of maths, literacy and science are declining when compared with other OECD nations and that decline mirrors the increasingly complicated working conditions of public school teachers.

It's a relationship that deserves closer inspection.

The growing expectation on teachers to audit their performance and outcomes doesn't speak the language of the classroom.

Teachers are suffering from audit anxiety and it is unquestionably the biggest existential threat to public education.

PISA results evidence of a bureaucracy-borne crisis

As soon as a learning experience becomes a "target", it risks becoming just data collected for PR purposes.

It does not create a magical learning environment that sees students zoom up international rankings of learning outcomes.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results can be read as evidence of this bureaucracy-borne crisis.

Hong Kong performed at the same level as Australia in reading in 2000, but outperformed Australia in 2018. ( Supplied )

Published this week, the 2018 PISA report surveyed more than half a million 15-year-olds around the world.

The results revealed Australia's ranking is only average despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the OECD.

As teachers, we know all too well what happens when a large sets of data create alarms bells for policy makers: it means we have an even more impoverished work-life balance as we are required to take on yet more administrative tasks to justify our teaching methods.

The NSW story

It is of no surprise that NSW is Australia's poorest PISA performer, recording the largest backwards fall in reading and science since the assessment program began in 2000.

NSW arguably inflicts the most convoluted suite of bureaucratic measures on its teachers.

In my job as a classroom teacher I have seen, and personally experienced, how the time it takes to fulfil these expectations can lead to constant anxiety and exhaustion.

Using teachers as scapegoats for poor PISA results has manifested as a trifecta of extra administrative tasks: PLAN2, External Validation, and Accreditation.

The result is that teachers are unable to operate at their full potential and effectiveness in the job they are trained to do — teach children.

The NSW Department of Education's audit regime, inspired by the UK's system, is known as "External Validation". It is about as pointless and dire as things get.

In the final weeks of the auditing process, many teachers are taken out of the classroom for whole days at a time to work on formatting the massive word document required to be submitted as part of the measure.

Australia's slide backwards ( Supplied )

At the school where I teach, this labour deficit was filled by the collapse of special needs programs because specialist teachers were required to substitute as classroom teachers.

As a result, students with the highest level of need — who have a statutory right to access support in public schools — were no longer receiving any support.

So what do we need to do?

My experience with the NSW Education Standards Authority accreditation process, for example, requires hours of research to gather the documents needed to justify compliance.

I have engaged in months-long email chains with executive staff and bureaucrats to sign-off my accreditation documentation.

It is a head-spinning exercise and I do not believe there is any discernible real-world trade-off that makes me a better teacher.

Another time thief is PLAN2 or "ALAN" (Assessing Literacy and Numeracy), the new online data collection platform the Department of Education is slowly rolling out to the chagrin of teachers.

The dense and user-unfriendly ALAN interface is built around hundreds of micro-audits known as "progressions" that place an emphasis on tracking low-level skills to the detriment of enhancing critical thinking skills.

For example, data must be assessed, collected, and analysed on a child's ability to "recognise logos" and "turn pages of a book correctly".

The system is so unnecessarily dense that teachers are taken off class for whole days just to complete the required data entry.

A day's work might see you complete roughly half of the data entry requirements for one or two children in literacy.

Classrooms have been transformed from environments for learning and enrichment to sites of data extraction and over-assessment.

Australian school children are falling behind in literacy compared to other OECD countries.

The assumption that the audit regimes which increase workload and micro-manage teachers and students will deliver a natural enhancement in learning is baseless because results are not improving.

The only winner is the government of the day which can project an image of taking action.

We are being pushed to the brink

And yet the governments and policymakers appear to wilfully ignore how these expectations decrease teacher productivity and impact learning outcomes for students.

Instead of improving the literacy, maths and science outcomes for our students, policymakers have created the conditions that informed the poor PISA results.

It is vital to remember that the working conditions of teachers is the learning environment for students.

The way to improve outcomes for students is to improve the real-world conditions for teachers.

Requiring teachers to fulfil ever-expanding audit regimes is pushing us to the brink.

Most teachers do not believe that these validation and accreditation processes are improving student outcomes — and the PISA results back this up.

Dan Hogan is a writer and teacher.