The Answer Is in the Library. We Keep Looking Elsewhere.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

The shocking results of the 2025 National Assessment Program – ICT Literacy (NAP‑ICTL) report are right to attract media attention. In 2025, only 37% of Year 10 students across Australia met or exceeded the proficient standard for ICT literacy. That is the lowest proportion since the assessment began in 2005. It is also a significant fall from 46% in 2022. Among Year 6 students, 50% met the standard, down from 55% three years ago (Friedman et al., 2026).

Although these results were drawn from a representative sample of 5,498 Year 6 students and 4,753 Year 10 students, what this indicates is that it is quite possible that the majority of Year 10 Australian secondary students do not meet what is described as a “challenging but reasonable” level of achievement expected for their year level.

Once again, there is debate and clamour about what can be done to arrest these falling standards, which have been trending downward since 2005. And once again, teacher librarians and school library professionals are rarely, if ever, part of the conversation.

Students Use Technology Constantly. That Is Not the Same as Understanding It.

The same report that delivered those sobering achievement results also tells us that most students reported extensive experience using digital tools, including computers, tablets, smartphones and smartwatches. More than 60% of Year 6 students said they had at least five years’ experience with digital tools; for Year 10, that figure was 77%. More than 30% of Year 6 students and 60% of Year 10 students report using AI tools to generate written content at least once a month. And 81% of Year 10 students use internet search daily or almost daily at school, with more than half of Year 6 students doing the same (Friedman et al., 2026).

Students are not disconnected from digital tools and environments. They are immersed in them.

The problem is that immersion and literacy are not the same thing. Knowing how to use a search engine is not the same as knowing how to evaluate what it returns.

This distinction has become more urgent with the rise of AI-generated search responses. Research by Oumi (2026) found that Google AI Overviews were accurate in approximately nine out of ten responses, which sounds encouraging; however, only 39% of those responses were both correct and fully supported by the sources they cited. In 61% of cases, the answer looked right, but the evidence did not hold up. Caswell’s (2026) analysis identified how these errors tend to manifest: important context is left out, complex topics are oversimplified, and partially correct information is presented as though it were fully accurate. These are not the dramatic hallucinations that students might notice and question. They are plausible, confident-sounding errors that slide past without detection.

This is the environment in which the vast majority of Australian students are conducting their research, unassisted and underprepared.

The Stakes Are Not Confined to Classrooms

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 ranked misinformation and disinformation as the top short-term global risk, with AI-enabled synthetic content identified as a key accelerant (World Economic Forum, 2026). Societal polarisation — both a cause and a consequence of the information environment — appears among the top risks over a ten-year horizon.

I’m not including this to be dramatic. I honestly believe the connections here matter. When we invest in information literacy, critical thinking, and the skills to evaluate what we read and watch online, we are not addressing a marginal curriculum concern. We are responding to one of the most serious challenges identified by experts across government, business, and civil society globally. The school library, and the teacher librarian who leads it, sits at the intersection of exactly these skills.

We Know What Works. We Have Known for a Long Time.

The research evidence supporting school libraries and qualified teacher-librarians is not thin or tentative. Hughes, Allan and Bozorgian (2025), reviewing studies from 2014 to 2023, present extensive evidence that well-resourced and professionally led school libraries contribute to student literacy, learning achievement, and wellbeing across diverse socio-economic settings and school levels. The pattern is consistent across more than 34 impact studies conducted across the USA by Lance and colleagues over three decades: students in schools with strong library programs tend to achieve higher standardised test scores, higher graduation rates, and stronger academic outcomes (Lance & Kachel, 2018). What is even more important is that these effects apply independently of students’ socio-economic or educational backgrounds.

That last point is so important. The NAP‑ICTL data shows, as it has consistently across previous cycles, that students in major cities consistently outperform their regional and remote counterparts. In 2025, the percentage of students from major city schools attaining the proficient standard was approximately twice that of students from remote schools. Parental occupation and parental education are both strongly and positively associated with student ICT literacy achievement (Friedman et al., 2026). The children who most need school to level the playing field are the ones most likely to be without a qualified teacher librarian.

My own research with Kasey Garrison (Oddone & Garrison, 2024) examined how Australian secondary teacher librarians understand and respond to the information literacy needs of both students and teachers in a rapidly changing information landscape. Teacher librarians described feeling the urgency of this challenge acutely, and articulated clear, considered approaches to addressing it. The expertise is there. The commitment is there. The professional infrastructure is there. What is missing is the institutional will to resource and mandate it.

So Why Isn’t This the Conversation We Are Having?

I ask this with genuine frustration, and I suspect many of you reading this share it.

School libraries and teacher librarians are not a luxury to be funded when budgets are comfortable and cut when they are not. They are an evidence-based response to some of the most pressing educational and social challenges of our time. And yet, in most Australian states, the qualified teacher librarian is not mandated in every school. Even in New South Wales, where the role is mandated, teacher librarians increasingly report being redirected from the library into classroom teaching — their specialist skills effectively dissolved into the general staffing pool.

We call for improved literacy. We commission reports on the harms of misinformation. We express concern about AI’s effects on learning, on wellbeing, on democracy. And then we look everywhere except the school library for a solution.

I understand the complexity school leaders face. Hughes et al. (2025) wrote their evidence review specifically for principals, with explicit recognition of the competing budgetary pressures they manage. I do not underestimate those pressures. But I would ask school leaders and policymakers to reconsider their stance on the value of school library professionals. The NAP‑ICTL results have been declining for years. The equity gaps are persistent and wide. The information environment students navigate is more dangerous and more difficult to assess than it has ever been. And there is a qualified specialist — trained in exactly the literacy skills this moment demands — whose numbers are dwindling in our schools.

The answer has been in the library all along. It is time we stopped walking past it.

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