Taliah is one of thousands who dropped out of high school. A major reform hopes to change this

At 15, Taliah Blakeley should be sitting in a high school classroom. She had always imagined herself in her year 12 graduation gown. Instead, the teenager is at home, studying at TAFE, after leaving her school due to bullying.

The teenager is one of a growing number of NSW public school students dropping out before finishing their final year.

The issue of falling year 12 completion rates was highlighted by Federal Education Minister Jason Clare in a speech on Tuesday, when he flagged a radical shake-up of four major federal education agencies to create a new Teaching and Learning Commission.

“In independent and Catholic schools, completion rates are high and are either stable or going up,” Clare said. “It’s in our public schools where the real challenge is. And where a lot of the heavy lifting happens.”

In the past decade, the percentage of public school students finishing year 12 has fallen from about 83 per cent to as low as 73 per cent, Clare said. In NSW last year that figure was lower, with 67 per cent of public school students completing year 12.

Taliah said bullying in her school was “out of control”, and said it was common for students to leave before year 12. “I was done with the school,” she said. “They weren’t doing anything. I moved to another public school and there was no support for my learning.”

She left school in year 9, and this year enrolled in TAFE, completing her year 10 working and skills certificate.

On Monday, Clare wrote to state and territory education ministers asking them to consider his plan for pulling the four agencies “under one roof” into the Teaching and Learning Commission, which would act as a single mega-agency to support reforms under new school funding agreements.

The super-agency would bring together Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) and Education Services Australia (ESA) into a single education bureaucracy. The merger would mark one of the biggest overhauls to the sector in 17 years.

Clare said the new commission would support reforms contained in the recent $16 billion school funding deals which tie extra money with lifting the proportion of school-leavers finishing year 12 and reducing the number of students failing to achieve minimum NAPLAN standards.

The agency would also analyse workforce data, advise on how to attract and retain teachers and strengthen “evidence-based teaching” methods, including explicit teaching and classroom management resources.

“We have got to reform the entire education system. And this is the big one,” Clare said. “If we want more Australians to take on a university degree, we need more to finish school.”

Taliah’s parents, Daniel and Lisa Di Bella, said schools needed to do more to help children reach year 12 and said their daughter wasn’t encouraged to stay in school. “School just destroyed her,” said Mr Di Bella.

Mrs Di Bella said: “Parents are doing their absolute best, but unfortunately something is falling through the cracks.”

State and territory ministers will meet to discuss the new agency in October.

ACARA, set up in 2008, is responsible for the delivery of the national curriculum and national assessment including NAPLAN, and reporting on schooling and student performance. AITSL creates national professional teaching standards and tracks teacher workforce data. AERO was formed in 2021 to research evidence-based teaching practices and distribute advice for teachers and schools.

Clare said the new agency would “maintain and protect the critical work that these organisations do now, and improve coordination” while also helping implement major reforms and “hit the targets we are all committed to”.

Glenn Fahey, director of the education program at the Centre for Independent Studies, said the new agency could have a chance at fixing the “complicated mess of the federal policymaking machine”.

“For two decades, the education system has been underperforming. Poor outcomes for students, new teachers under- or poorly prepared, and an ever-growing layer of chalk-pushers piling on red tape,” Fahey said.

“For too much of this time, education bureaucracies and institutions have gotten in the way of, rather than supported, improving the system.”

However, in recent years this has been changing, he said. “It is unlikely the new commission will do harm, but there’s also no guarantee of better outcomes. Clare will need to show that the new agency brings clarity, not just more centralisation into a bigger, blurrier bureaucracy.”

Murray Print, professor of education at Sydney University, said declining school completion rates in recent years was “symptomatic of a growing divide between the non-government and government school sectors”.

“Public schools are bleeding students, and while this is a state issue, the federal government is trying to address the problem,” Print said.

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