Australian 15-year-olds have just posted their lowest-ever reading and maths scores on the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment. It’s not a one-off dip. In fact, it’s the continuation of a slide that’s now run for two decades. And according to Six Bricks founder Dr Denise Meyerson, it isn’t a literacy problem at all — it’s an executive function problem.

Under the OECD’s own scoring benchmarks, roughly 20 points equals a year of learning. On that measure, Australian 15-year-olds are now about two years behind where their counterparts were in reading in 2000. For maths, the gap is even wider: slightly over two years behind 2003 levels.

Dr Denise Meyerson has a theory about why — and it isn’t the one most headlines are reaching for.

What the 2026 Numbers Actually Show — and What They Don’t

Understandably, most coverage of this week’s result has gone straight to the obvious question: are we teaching reading and maths badly? But Dr Meyerson disagrees. As founder of The Focus Learning Group and its early-years brand Six Bricks Learning, she thinks that’s the wrong question entirely.

Australia has spent two decades investing in reading and numeracy programs, phonics reforms, and literacy interventions. Even so, scores have kept falling anyway. That’s not evidence those programs are worthless. Instead, it shows the real problem starts earlier, and lower down, than any of them can reach.

Neither of those is a reading score or a maths score. Instead, both are closer to what executive function actually looks like inside a classroom. In short, it’s the ability to settle, attend, and show up consistently enough to learn anything at all.

Executive Function: The Skill Underneath the Skills

Executive function is the set of cognitive skills that let a child hold information in mind, manage their attention, regulate their own behaviour, and notice patterns. Researchers commonly break it down into three parts: working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control. In fact, research consistently shows executive function is a stronger predictor of later academic achievement than early literacy or numeracy skills taught in isolation. That’s because it’s the machinery reading and maths instruction assumes is already running.

Consider a child who can’t yet hold two or three pieces of information in mind. That child won’t get much out of a phonics lesson that requires holding a sound, a letter, and a blending rule all at once. Similarly, a child who can’t sustain attention isn’t failing at maths. The task simply demands more attentional stamina than that child has built yet. So reading and numeracy programs aren’t wrong to exist. Instead, they sit on top of a foundation that a growing number of Australian children never had the chance to build properly.

Children build that foundation early, well before they sit at a school desk. And they build it through a specific kind of experience: hands-on, open-ended, physical play. Not worksheets. Not apps. Instead, it takes real materials, real time, and enough of both for a child to build something, watch it fail, and try again.

“The Fumbling Is the Learning” — Not a Delay Before It

This is the part of Dr Meyerson’s argument that cuts against a lot of well-meaning classroom instinct. Watching a child struggle looks like time being lost — a block tower that keeps falling, a pattern that won’t quite come together, a plan abandoned halfway through. But it isn’t.

Every one of those moments is a small, repeated rehearsal of a missing skill. Specifically, this week’s PISA data points to exactly which ones: holding a plan in mind, adjusting it when it doesn’t work, noticing the pattern in what went wrong, and sticking with a problem long enough to solve it.

That’s a confronting way to put it, and Dr Meyerson means it that way. In other words, a national test score isn’t something that goes wrong at 15. Educators and systems build it — or don’t — years earlier, one under-resourced early years classroom at a time.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Six Bricks Learning, part of The Focus Learning Group, has spent years building a play-based early childhood methodology around exactly this premise. Two programs lead the way: the Executive Function Academy and the Build-a-Book series. Together, more than 120 early learning centres in Australia and internationally now use both programs.

Picture what that looks like day to day. A teacher hands a small group of four-year-olds a handful of DUPLO®-style bricks, with no instructions beyond “build something tall.” First, one child plans carefully before placing a single brick. Meanwhile, another builds, watches it topple, and rebuilds — three times in ten minutes, without ever losing interest. Elsewhere, a third narrates the whole process out loud. Notably, none of it looks like a literacy or numeracy lesson. Yet all of it is working memory, inhibitory control, and pattern recognition in action. It’s the exact cognitive scaffolding this week’s PISA data suggests too many Australian teenagers arrived at school without.

The point isn’t that six bricks alone will move a national test score. Rather, someone has to build the skills underneath every test score, somewhere, well before Year 10. Right now, in Australia, that early foundational work simply isn’t happening consistently enough.

What Educators and Policymakers Can Actually Do With This

Dr Meyerson is available for interview to discuss why this is an executive function problem, not just a literacy one, and to offer practical, evidence-based alternatives for early childhood educators and policymakers. In particular, three things follow directly from this week’s result:

1. Stop treating early years play as a warm-up for “real” school. After all, executive function predicts later achievement better than isolated literacy or numeracy drills. That means the years before school already decide a large share of the outcome.
2. Fund the foundation, not just the fix. Two decades of investment in reading and numeracy programs hasn’t reversed the decline, because the programs arrive after the gap has already opened.
3. Judge early childhood practice by the fumbling, not despite it. A four-year-old whose tower keeps falling over isn’t behind — they’re doing the work. Yet frameworks that reward tidy outcomes over visible struggle work against the very skills this week’s data says Australia needs more of.

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About Dr Denise Meyerson and Six Bricks Learning

Sources: OECD, “PISA 2025 Results,” released 8 September 2026; ABC News, “Australian students record worst-ever reading and maths results in international PISA test,” 8 September 2026. This piece also draws on a Six Bricks Learning press statement issued 9 September 2026.