What Did We Expect?

We live inside technology. It is our reality and our kids have never known a world outside of it. Two articles published in Wednesday’s The Age, 'We gave our kids endless tech. Their digital skills are at a 20-year low' and 'Australian kids go backwards again in digital literacy', put forward questions and concerns about our young people – our digital natives – born tech-fluent, capable of navigating an iPhone before they can speak, comfortable and capable in a world of screens and systems. 

Why then, asks the commentary, are they showing data deficits in this very area? 

Let’s have a look. 

In 2025, ACARA – the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority – released the results of its national ICT Literacy assessment, a non-mandatory test conducted every three years to measure how well Australian students can use technology. Use technology. What does that mean, exactly? We all use technology without deciding to use technology; my grandmother uses her iPad to pay bills from the kitchen table. Using it is not the problem. 

What the ACARA test actually asked students to do was harder than that. Students were given simulated real-world tasks: managing information, evaluating digital content – is this photo real? – solving problems and communicating through digital tools. To reach what’s described as the proficient standard, a ‘challenging but reasonable’ level of achievement for their age. Students needed to demonstrate they could do more than operate a device. They needed to show they could think with one, something which is an altogether different demand. And, according to the assessment, they fell short.
 
In 2025, only 50 per cent of Year 6 students met that standard. For Year 10, it was 37 per cent – the lowest result since testing began in 2005. 

But let’s take a moment’s pause. The Year 10 students who sat this test in 2025 were in Year 6 when the last assessment was run in 2022. They haven’t stalled, they’ve gone backwards. So, what happened, not just to them, but to everything around them, in those three years? 

So. Much. Happened. 

In November 2022, ChatGPT launched. Within five days, it had a million users, and within two months, one hundred million. It set the record for the fastest adoption of any consumer application in history. Facebook took six years to build the same momentum that ChatGPT managed in two months. By the end of 2025, the platform had 800 million active users a week. This is not incremental change, I think of it as more of a rupture – and the kids were twelve.

By the time this cohort reached Year 10, around 60 per cent of them were regularly using AI to generate written content. Rapid normalisation is what we’re calling it. One in four was using it at school every day. So, look out, VCE. 

But here’s what the data is actually showing us, and it’s not what it looks like on the surface. What the assessment actually measured, despite its name, was not technological skill. It measured an inability to find, evaluate, manage and communicate information. To detect when something is wrong. To ask why, not just what. We are missing something pretty major if we think these are technological skills. These are the complex capabilities, the critical thinking skills – the human ones. 
 
Which brings us to the generation being measured – and the question we should be sitting with. These young people sit at the intersection of Generation Z and Alpha, the first cohort born into a world where devices do the thinking for them. Their baseline is cognitive offloading. It’s not of their choosing; it’s their reality. Why would they interrogate 'the data'? Do they critique and evaluate the dinner that’s put in front of them? Granted, that may be a poor example, but do we assume that a child raised in a house full of books is automatically a literary critic?  

Then, the most powerful content-generation tool in human history landed – right in the middle of the most neurologically critical window of their lives. 

You see, the adolescent brain undergoes a process called synaptic pruning: Yes, you can see it as you hear it, use it or – snip – lose it. Reward drivers. Impulse control. On top of that, it’s the 'critical thinking' building boom – analyse, evaluate, validate, reason, build that working memory. AI arrives and handles all of that cognitive load for them, and the brain – at this time, writing itself – doesn’t need to dig the foundations for those pathways to the same depth. This feels like a collision of catastrophic proportions.

Only 50 per cent of Year 6 students, and 66 per cent of Year 10 students, report being taught at school how to judge whether AI-generated information is accurate. Notably, it is the students themselves asking to be taught. They know something is off, even without the language or the instruction to do anything about it. 

Their baseline, their zero, is a world where content is always available, always instant, always generated by someone or something else. They are, as one researcher put it, ‘consumers of content’ in place of being creators – and it's because that’s what we fed them. We gave them devices and apps that we barely knew our own way around, bright screens that reward their time and button-pressing before they even knew they wanted it. So, a generation optimised for consumption is now being measured against old standards. How are we surprised by the results? 

The acquisition of content, AI has made that ridiculously easy. Tasks can be performed without understanding, but the capacity to think cannot be automated or downloaded. Effort and struggle, sustained experience, hand to brain, figure it out and learn. 

The question is not whether that capacity exists in young people, because it does. The question is whether school is the place that lets it grow – or the place that, through busyness and device abundance and the absence of real intellectual struggle, quietly lets it be pruned away.  

Adventurous Minds is not a slogan in response to a problem; Founder, Michael Norman, famously said, We ought never to do for young people what they, with a struggle, could be expected to be doing for themselves and it’s an ethos that has been here for decades. It is a description of what Woodleigh has always believed adolescence is for, and what our thirteen years of schooling are capable of building. It’s not what we know, but what we do with what we know. If you’ve ever been within five feet of Woodleigh School Principal David Baker, you’ll have heard the mantra – and he means it. Woodleigh means it.  

The adventurous mind, curious, questioning, willing to struggle, capable of independent thought, turns out to be the precise set of capacities the ACARA data reveals are most at risk, and most urgently needed. Woodleigh has always understood that the struggle is not an obstacle to learning; it is the learning. 

The ACARA results are new, and the neuroscience absolutely feels urgent. The AI explosion is unprecedented, but the answer is in none of those things. The answer is actually not new, it’s old – older than the research, the algorithm, older than the device, older than the screen. It is the belief that adolescence is not a delivery mechanism for content but the formation of a person. That struggle is not an obstacle; it’s the learning. A questioning mind is not a happy accident but something a school either deliberately builds or slowly fails.