Australia's education ministers have agreed that the Year 5 writing component of NAPLAN, the national literacy and numeracy assessment, will be sat with pen and paper from 2028.
The Year 3 writing test is already on paper. Whether Years 7 and 9 follow has not been decided; the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which administers NAPLAN, will advise ministers on that question.
New South Wales Deputy Premier and Education Minister Prue Car put the case for the change in terms of screen use. "There is a lot of evidence to suggest that excessive screen time has been harmful for students and their outcomes," she said.
Students, she said, "actually do better when they're writing pen to paper as opposed to typing on screen". She wants Years 7 and 9 moved to paper as well.
The decision lands against a run of poor results. About a third of Australian students are not meeting what the assessment describes as "challenging but reasonable" expectations in foundational literacy and numeracy, and in the international PISA exams Australian students recorded their worst-ever scores.
Device use is unusually high by comparison with peer countries. Australian students spend an average of 2.6 hours a day on digital devices, against an OECD average of 1.7 hours.
Ministers also agreed to begin work on what they are calling a "digital detox" for classrooms. New South Wales will mandatorily introduce classroom screen time limits from 2028, phased in year by year from preschool through to Year 12 in the final examination year.
Professor Pamela Snow of La Trobe University said technology had "got way ahead of the evidence" in education, and that she was not aware of "any actual evidence" that technology has enhanced student learning.
Dany Elachi, founder of the Heads Up Alliance, called the state's screen time parameters and the proposed NAPLAN reforms "welcome steps in the right direction", while arguing that more was needed.
A communique from the ministers is expected later this week. It is understood to endorse a new federal super commission, in part to address the rate at which students leave school before completing Year 12. The meeting was reported by ABC News.
The reform deserves to be followed carefully, because a good deal of the work is being done by its timetable. The evidence has been accepted now. The instrument commences in 2028.
That interval has an arithmetic consequence. A pupil in Year 3 in 2026 is in Year 5 in 2028, and the Year 3 writing test is already sat on paper. The first cohort to sit the Year 5 writing test with a pen will therefore be a cohort that has never sat a writing test any other way.
This is not a small administrative detail. It is the reform, expressed as a calendar. A format is being restored to pupils who have not yet left it, which makes the change the rare kind of policy that cannot fail on delivery.
The detox is built on the same principle. A programme phased in from preschool to the final year of school runs for thirteen years, which is also the length of an Australian school education. A child who starts at the beginning of the detox finishes it on the day they finish school.
The Department of Unnecessary Research raises no objection to any of this and notes only the sequence. The evidence has been accepted. The pupils have been given a commencement date.