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This week’s NAPLAN results reveal a growing share of NSW students cannot read or write to the expected standard, with The Daily Telegraph reporting a widening gap between the state’s best and worst performers despite governments tipping record sums into public schools.

Family First National Director and NSW Legislative Council candidate Lyle Shelton says the 2026 NAPLAN results are proof that Labor and Liberal governments have failed a generation of NSW children, warning that decades of ideological experimentation in the classroom have come at the expense of the basics every child needs to read, write and add up.

The Daily Telegraph revealed NSW’s own results show 9.8 per cent of Year 3 students are now in the bottom NAPLAN band for reading, up from 9.5 per cent last year and 7.7 per cent three years ago, while 5.2 per cent of Year 3 students were rated as needing additional support for writing, up from 4.0 per cent the year before. Centre for Independent Studies director of education research Blaise Joseph said national results had “flatlined”, with almost a third of students either ‘developing’ or in need of additional assistance with the fundamentals of literacy and numeracy.

“For years we’ve been told more money and more programs will fix our schools, yet here we are with more kids falling behind on the absolute basics of reading and writing,” Mr Shelton said. “Whether it’s a Labor Education Minister spruiking another taxpayer-funded initiative or a federal government boasting about a $20 billion cheque, both sides of politics keep throwing money at a system that keeps failing our kids, because neither will admit the real problem: classrooms have been overloaded with ideology instead of phonics, times tables and the basics that actually work.”

NSW Education Minister Prue Car insisted this year’s results show students are “continuing to perform at a high level” and pointed to mandatory professional development in teaching writing from next year, while federal Education Minister Jason Clare declared the “reading wars are over” and pointed to an extra $20 billion pledged for public schools over the next decade. But Mr Joseph noted funding “has continued to grow significantly” without a corresponding lift in results, telling the Telegraph “there’s more money going into schools but we’re not seeing better outcomes.”

Mr Shelton pointed to schools such as Mount Druitt’s Emerton Public School, which lifted its results this year through explicit, evidence-based teaching, as proof that a return to proven methods — not more taxpayer-funded ideology — is what actually turns results around.

“Families are sick of hearing about billions in new funding while their kids fall further behind,” Mr Shelton said. “We need to scrap the ideological fads, get critical race theory and gender theory out of the classroom, and put reading, writing, arithmetic and real Australian history back at the centre of every school day. Parents are the primary educators of their children, not the state, and it’s time our schools, our curriculum and our teacher training reflected that. If elected, Family First will demand a back-to-basics curriculum overhaul and hold state and federal governments to account for every dollar they claim is fixing our kids’ education — because right now, the results prove it isn’t.”