Kayla is seventeen and works three shifts a week stacking shelves at a supermarket in Burnie, on Tasmania's north-west coast. She left school at the end of Year 10, not because she failed, but because the local high school did not offer Years 11 and 12, and the nearest college was a bus trip and a life reorganisation away. Two years on, she reads well enough to text her friends and follow a recipe, but a job ad full of "key selection criteria" leaves her cold. She is close to the median, not the exception. Tasmania has spent a generation near the bottom of the country's literacy and school-completion tables, and Kayla's stalled trajectory is what that statistic looks like from the inside. The Rockliff government has now put a literacy strategy and a school-extension program on the record as its answer. Whether that answer arrives before another generation of Kaylas leaves school too early is the question this analysis puts to the evidence.
What the government did
Tasmania's education problem is old and well documented, and this government did not invent it. What it did do — starting when Jeremy Rockliff himself held the education portfolio in the mid-2010s and continuing through his premiership — is commit to two structural reforms aimed at the system's weakest points: the Years 9–12 Project and the Lifting Literacy strategy. The Years 9–12 Project addressed a peculiarly Tasmanian design flaw: uniquely among the states, most government high schools historically stopped at Year 10, forcing students into a second enrolment at a second campus, often a different town, to complete Years 11 and 12 — exactly the transition point where isolated or disengaged students tend to drop out. From 2014, the government began extending secondary schools to offer Years 11 and 12 on the same campus, and by the 2020s most did so, alongside the state's traditional senior colleges (DECYP, Years 9 to 12 Project, final update). The Tasmanian Audit Office reviewed the rollout in its Report of the Auditor-General No. 1 of 2022–23, "Improving Outcomes for Tasmanian Senior Secondary Students," examining whether it was actually lifting attendance, retention and attainment (Tasmanian Audit Office, Report No. 1 of 2022–23).
The second reform followed a 2023 report from an independent Literacy Advisory Panel, which found Tasmanian classrooms were using inconsistent, evidence-light methods to teach reading. The government accepted its central recommendation: mandate a single evidence-based "structured literacy" approach — explicit phonics instruction — in every government primary school, rolling out in 25 per cent of schools in 2024 and scaling to all of them by the start of 2026 (DECYP, Lifting Literacy Implementation Plan 2024–2026, Feb-2025 update). A companion measure, the mandatory Year 1 Phonics Screening Check introduced from 2023, made Tasmania the first state to check every child's decoding skills at a single, comparable point. Tasmania also signed the Commonwealth's Better and Fairer Schools Agreement in 2025, under which government schools reach full needs-based funding by the start of 2026, tied to matching state literacy commitments (Premier of Tasmania, Oct-2024; Ministers' Media Centre, Mar-2025). Education Minister Jo Palmer has made the rollout the centrepiece of the government's record on the portfolio (DECYP, 2025 Progress Report).
The strongest case
A government that finally named the problem correctly
Give the Rockliff government its due: for the first time in at least a decade, Tasmania has a government treating chronically poor literacy and retention as an engineering problem with a knowable fix, not an unfortunate cultural fact. The Years 9–12 reform addressed a genuine structural cause of Tasmania's uniquely low retention — a second-enrolment barrier no other state imposed — and it was not cheap; it meant building senior-secondary capacity in dozens of towns that had none. Lifting Literacy went further than any predecessor by accepting an independent panel's uncomfortable finding that the state's own teaching methods were part of the problem, mandating one evidence-based approach system-wide, and building in a measurement instrument — the Year 1 Phonics Check — so the target cannot quietly slide unmeasured. Locking in full needs-based funding by 2026 removes the recurring excuse that reform was unaffordable. Early results are moving the right way: the share of Year 1 students meeting the phonics benchmark rose 6.7 percentage points between 2023 and 2025, to 56.6 per cent, and the government's own January 2025 Independent Review of Education — led by former ACARA chief Geoff Masters — backed it to "stay the course" (DECYP, 2025 Progress Report; Premier of Tasmania, Jan-2025). Correctly diagnosing the mechanism of failure, rather than announcing another slogan, is a real break from the pattern that preceded it.
The evidence
The strongest case only matters if the underlying numbers move, and on the measures that count most, Tasmania is still last or second-last in the country. The Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services put Tasmania's Year 12 (or equivalent) attainment rate at approximately 53 per cent in 2022 — the lowest of any state, against a national average of about 76 per cent, a gap that has widened over the preceding decade (Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services 2024, Part B, Chapter 4). The apparent retention rate from Year 7/8 through to Year 12 sat at approximately 71.7 per cent, the lowest in the country outside the Northern Territory and close to where it stood in 2010 — meaning the Years 9–12 building program had not yet visibly shifted this measure (ABS, Schools, Australia, cat. no. 4221.0, 2024 release). NAPLAN tells the same story earlier in the pipeline: on the most recent results, roughly three in five Tasmanian students met expected reading and numeracy standards, meaning close to two in five did not — the worst state result outside the NT (Premier of Tasmania, NAPLAN 2024 National Results, Aug-2024). Tasmania also records a gap of more than 25 percentage points in Year 12 completion between high- and low-SES students, among the widest of any state (ABS, Education attainment, Measuring What Matters framework).
Adult literacy is the deeper constraint the school system is building its way out from under. Tasmania's own 26TEN adult-literacy strategy, drawing on ABS skills surveys, has for years cited a figure of close to half of Tasmanian working-age adults reading below the minimum standard needed for everyday tasks — filling out a form, reading a medicine label, following a safety instruction (approx.) (26TEN Tasmania, Strategy for Adult Literacy and Numeracy 2016–2025, citing ABS skills data). That describes the parents and on-the-job trainers today's schoolchildren are growing up around — precisely why the literacy panel concluded classrooms alone could not solve it.
The economic cost of the gap
None of this stays inside the school gate. Tasmania has the lowest labour-force participation rate of any state, at approximately 60 per cent in April 2025 against a national rate of about 67 per cent, and the highest rate of underemployment (Tasmanian Department of Treasury and Finance, Labour Force report, Apr-2025; ABS, Labour Force, Australia). Median employee earnings sit at the bottom of the state table too, at roughly $1,890 a week against a national leader above $2,300 (approx.) (ABS, Characteristics of Employment, Australia). And the share of Tasmanians aged 15 to 24 fully engaged in work or study — the indicator most directly downstream of school completion — is around 75 per cent, against a high of about 84 per cent in the ACT (approx.) (ABS, Measuring What Matters, prosperous theme). These are not unrelated facts about a small, remote state; they describe a single mechanism — a school system that has, for a generation, sent a larger share of its population into adult life without the certificate, and often without the reading level, the labour market prices most highly.
A state cannot out-invest a literacy problem it has not yet finished measuring — and Tasmania has spent longer measuring this one than most states have spent solving it.
The critique
The critique here is not that the Rockliff government picked the wrong reforms. Structured literacy and same-campus senior schooling are the interventions the evidence actually supports, and both were adopted years — in the case of same-campus schooling, a full decade — after Tasmania's own commissioned reviews first recommended them. The Years 9–12 Project began in 2014; the Auditor-General's 2022–23 audit still found reason to examine, rather than confirm, whether it was lifting outcomes as promised, and the retention rate it was designed to fix sat at 71.7 per cent in the most recent data — statistically close to where it stood before the reform began. A structurally sound fix has still not closed the gap it was built to close, more than a decade on. That gap between diagnosis and delivery is what this article audits, not the diagnosis itself.
The literacy program carries a version of the same risk on a shorter clock. Lifting Literacy is barely two years into a three-year plan, structured literacy is not yet in every government primary school, and the phonics check — while showing real early gains — measures decoding in Year 1, years before Year 12 attainment and adult-literacy numbers can move at all. The government may soon be able to point to improved Year 1 results while the numbers that most affect Tasmania's economy stay unmoved for years yet, simply because of the lag built into thirteen years of schooling. That is not evidence the policy is wrong; it is evidence that success cannot yet be claimed, and a government under minority-Parliament pressure has every incentive to reach for the early, favourable number over the slower one.
There is also a capacity question the reforms do not fully answer, and a distributional one they do not yet target. Extending schools to Years 11 and 12 and mandating a single teaching method both require a workforce — literacy specialists, senior-secondary subject teachers in small regional schools — Tasmania has historically struggled to recruit and retain, particularly on the west coast and in the north-west, regions this site's companion analysis of the Tasmanian health system documents as chronically understaffed. The Australian Education Union has argued classroom-support funding has not kept pace with the structured-literacy mandate, a concern the government's own January 2025 Independent Review echoed when it recommended trialling shared staffing between smaller schools rather than assuming each could deliver the model alone (AEU Tasmania, media statement; Independent Review of Education, Final Report, Jan-2025). And a more than 25-percentage-point completion gap between high- and low-SES students shows the problem is not evenly spread across a small, homogeneous state — it is concentrated in the low-income, outer-suburban and rural communities already carrying the state's highest unemployment and lowest median income. A universal reform applied evenly to an unevenly distributed problem will close the gap more slowly than one deliberately weighted toward the communities furthest behind, and the government has not yet published a plan that does so.
The risk to the future
A generation the state's own recovery depends on
Tasmania's stated ambitions — a bigger renewable-energy export industry, a more skilled health and aged-care workforce, a tourism sector paying above minimum award rates, a state budget that stops relying on GST top-ups — all assume a more literate, better-credentialled workforce than the one the state is producing today. If Lifting Literacy and the Years 9–12 reforms do not measurably close the Year 12 attainment and adult-literacy gaps within the decade, Tasmania risks locking in its position as the state with the lowest workforce participation and lowest median income in the country — not for lack of jobs or policy attention, but because too large a share of each new adult cohort leaves school without the reading level or the certificate the available jobs require. That is a self-reinforcing trap: low attainment depresses participation and income, which depresses the tax base available to support the next cohort's education, and the gap that began in a Year 1 classroom compounds all the way into the state's fiscal position two decades later. The reforms now under way are the right shape to break that cycle. Whether they run long enough, and reach deeply enough into the communities furthest behind, before the next generation of Tasmanian school leavers makes the same choice Kayla did, is not yet settled by the evidence.