Casula High School students Irene Da Costa and Jack Highgaite with Education Minister Adrian Piccoli. Credit:Nic Walker Where once Australia kept up with South Korea, now our east Asian neighbours are streaking ahead on tests that compare the academic ability of 15-year-olds around the world. Students from Poland and Vietnam are now outperforming Australia's teenagers. If our results were to match South Korea's by the end of this century the Australian economy would be $4.7 trillion better off, says the OECD. This week, a new report from the Grattan Institute gave Australia's educators plenty more to think about. Amid declining standards in a global context, Australia's own domestic assessment system was also found wanting. The report found many of the nation's students were incapable of reaching benchmarks set by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority.

Simon Birmingham, Minister for Education and Training, at Parliament House in Canberra. Credit:Andrew Meares According to the Grattan Institute year 9 students were meeting the national minimum standard even if they were actually achieving below the level of a typical year 5 student. "Australia must raise its sights," says the report's author Peter Goss. Andreas Schleicher of the OECD is concerned about falling Australian standards. Credit:Jeffrey Glorfeld "The bar we are setting with the [NAPLAN] national minimum standard is just too low. If we set the bar too low, it is very hard to aim high."

The warning signs have been there for over a decade. Australia's PISA results have been on the slide since 2003. NAPLAN tests have shown the writing ability of Australia's students has not improved since 2008. Australia must raise its sights. Peter Goss All the while the computer literacy of the nation's students has reached a crisis point. The 2015 results showed that in an area crucial to the nation's future prosperity, only 55 per cent of 10,000 students tested by ACARA were considered IT proficient. As our literary and computer skills have declined, so too has the nation's mathematical ability, drawing outcry from the academic and business communities.

The chair of the National Committee for Mathematical Sciences, Nalini Joshi, says that compulsory mathematical subjects "absolutely have to become a national policy". "We are leaching out the mathematical skills from the majority of the population," she says. "We are not just talking about university entry anymore, we are taking about larger portions of the population who would find it difficult to work out something that isn't plugged into a calculator. "Apprentices are becoming bricklayers who don't how many bricks to order and students are becoming nurses who are unable to work out dosages."

Schleicher identified a lack of investment in Australia's teachers as the central reason for the lacklustre results. He described Australia's education system as "a classroom led by robotic widgets", forced into delivering a rigid curriculum. Teacher quality, Schleicher believes, is at the heart of every successful education system, from Finland to South Korea, and Australia must do something about it to have any hope of thriving in the global economy. "What I like is the image of a professional that is not just defined by delivering an established curriculum but people who see themselves as owners of professional standards," he says. "People who learn from and with their colleagues, where there is a greater degree of professional collaboration and professional autonomy." Schleicher says the education industry is about 150 years behind health in its capacity for collaboration and development, key aspects that have seen doctors rise to the top of the social and professional ladder. "We are still very far away," he says. "In Finland they are doing really well, every teacher has to do a masters thesis to create a professional inquisitive mindset, so they know 'I work with my colleagues but I'm also responsible for developing the work of my colleagues'."

He says teachers in Shanghai spend one lesson a week in someone else's classroom working on collective lesson planning, design and evaluation. "Look to Australia, you more or less define teachers by the number of hours that you teach in front of students, and that is part of the problem." Educators, politicians, and academics agree, Australian teachers have an image issue. In September, NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli said the choice of teaching as a profession had become "a joke".

"I keep hearing stories about students coming into schools and principals saying that they are not up to scratch," Piccoli told an education leaders' conference in Sydney, before announcing tough new entry restrictions on teaching degrees. "There is this joke, I couldn't get into physiotherapy so I went into teaching. That is just unhelpful for that person and it's unhelpful for the profession," he said. The same dilemma was at the heart of the debate among world leaders in Dubai where the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO] sought to define the teacher of 2030. "Is it a real profession, is it for talented people?" asked the executive director of Brazil's Education Laboratory, Beatriz Cardoso. "I think we have to face these dilemmas." Indonesia's Education Minister Anies Baswedan told global leaders that Australia's largest neighbour had taken steps to elevate the status of the teacher in response to the recommendations of the OECD.

"We now have a dedicated teacher check-in desk for Garuda Airlines," he said. "We would also like them to introduce priority boarding, first class, business class, and teachers class." "Why? It's a reminder to everyone. Airports are where policymakers are constantly, it makes them realise they are flying because teachers taught them, without those teachers they would not be flying." Schleicher sees targeted funding as crucial part of allowing education systems to be able to afford to rotate teachers through professional development and classroom time. He praised Australia's needs-based Gonski reforms, which directs funding to students with disabilities and from low socio-economic areas, as a step in the right direction.

The federal government does not agree with Schleicher's assessment. It has so far refused to honour the final two years of Gonski funding, potentially stripping an estimated $4.5 billion out of the nation's schools. Last week Education Minister Simon Birmingham seized on Australia's declining PISA results as evidence that more funding does not necessarily equal greater results. He did so again when the Grattan Institute's damning report came out this week. "The report is a wake-up call for those policymakers who are fixated on how much Australia spends on education," he says. "It highlights the need to focus education reform conversations on how to lift standards, not a simplistic debate about how much we spend." Despite the near unanimous calls from teachers over the effectiveness of Gonski funding and Piccoli's passionate belief in its merits, the NSW government now appears to have backed down on its demands. Fierce lobbying from Piccoli and Premier Mike Baird has given way to compromise, with two years of funding now set to be spread over four, a pattern likely to be replicated across the states, according to documents obtained by Fairfax Media.

Schleicher fears that without adequate funding and a re-imagining of the role of the teacher, the best teachers won't go in to the most-needed areas and Australia risks falling further behind. "The competition for highly skilled workers is fierce," says Schleicher. "We are not getting them into education unless we make changes."