NAPLAN results reveal one in three students not meeting basic ...

One in three Australian school students is not meeting literacy and numeracy benchmarks, and more than one in ten need additional support, the 2024 NAPLAN results show.

"In plain English, one third of Australia's children are not on track with their learning," the Grattan Institute's education director Jordana Hunter said. 

Experts say the scores demonstrate the urgent need for classroom reforms, otherwise a significant part of a generation looks set to miss out on crucial foundational learning. 

"It's almost half a million students around the country that are not where we need them to be," Dr Hunter said.

"The NAPLAN results are sending a pretty clear message. The question I have is 'are education ministers listening?'"

The NAPLAN data has landed at a time when the Commonwealth is locked in negotiations with the states and territories over a new public school funding deal to replace the old arrangement, under which public schools have been about $5 billion short of their minimum Gonski funding levels.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said the results showed why school funding talks were crucial — not just to supply extra money, but to reform classroom practices.

"Your chances in life shouldn't depend on your parents' pay packet or the colour of your skin, but these results again show that's still the case," he said.

"These results show why serious reform is needed and why we need to tie additional funding to reforms that will help students catch up, keep up and finish school."

The 2023 NAPLAN tests were the first assessed under a tougher, revamped set of criteria that experts said would give a true picture of the state of Australian classrooms.

"Last year when we saw the results against the new proficiency scale, a lot of people were quite disheartened," Dr Hunter said.

Outside of small increases and decreases across subjects and year levels, the 2024 numbers are similarly disappointing.

Experts say the results have highlighted a failure to teach hundreds of thousands of students the most basic skills, despite billions of dollars flowing into all school systems.

The NAPLAN 2024 results also showed long-standing educational disadvantage remained entrenched across Australia.

Non-Indigenous students' results remained substantially above their First Nations counterparts in all five testing domains: numeracy, reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation.

One third of Indigenous students were categorised as "need additional support" — three times the national average.

Stark differences also remained between metropolitan and non-metropolitan students.

For literacy, 24 per cent of students from very remote schools were categorised as "strong" or "exceeding" compared to 70.7 per cent of students from major cities. Numeracy statistics were almost identical.

Students whose parents held a bachelor's degree or higher tended to score better than their classmates whose parents' highest level of education was Year 11 or lower.

2024 was the second year of NAPLAN tests marked against a new set of standards.(ABC News: Michael Franchi)

Females outperformed males in writing across every year group, while males generally outperformed females in numeracy.

Out of the 4.4 million NAPLAN tests sat by almost 1.3 million students nationally, there was one substantiated cheating-related incident.

That occurred in Western Australia where "inappropriate assistance" was made available to 19 students. Those results were considered "compromised" and not included in national results.

The Western Australian School Curriculum and Standards Authority (WASCSA), which administered the test, said the students were in Year 3.

The school supplied students with a planning sheet for NAPLAN preparation, despite rules stipulating students only have a blank piece of paper while taking the online test.

"The identity of the parties involved in the test incident remains confidential and the matter has been referred ... for further investigation," a WASCSA spokesperson said.

There have previously been anecdotal reports of schools urging students who were expected to perform poorly to stay home on testing day to improve the overall marks for the school, and ultimately, the perceived appeal of the school to parents.

The 2024 NAPLAN report card comes as the deadline for the new public school funding agreement inches closer.

So far, only Western Australia and the Northern Territory have reached deals with the Commonwealth and signed on to its Better and Fairer Schools Agreement.

The Commonwealth has offered to lift its share of funding public schools from 20 per cent to 22.5 per cent, but the other states say the federal share should be 25 per cent.

Both sides have threatened to walk away from the talks if a deal is not reached by the end of September.

Mr Clare has insisted new funding be tied to measures like early interventions, evidence-based teaching and additional screening checks.

"I have made clear that the additional $16 billion of funding for public schools the government has put on the table will be tied to practical reforms, like phonics checks and numeracy checks, evidenced-based teaching and catch-up tutoring," he said.

"There are no blank cheques here. I want to invest billions into our public schools and I want to make sure that money makes a difference to the kids who really need it."

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare says the NAPLAN results show why school funding talks are crucial.(AAP Image: Mick Tsikas)

Dr Hunter said money had been wasted on ineffective classroom practices, with students from disadvantaged backgrounds suffering as a result.

"The first best strategy governments can take is to stop spending precious dollars on ineffective programs and invest instead in an expert teaching profession that is upskilled in evidence-based teaching, including explicit teaching approaches," she said.

Shadow education minister Sarah Henderson said the "disastrous" NAPLAN results were caused by the government's failure to strike a deal and introduce school reforms.

"The Albanese government has failed to deliver the national school reforms it promised and Australian children and their families are paying the price," Senator Henderson said.

"Rather than put students first ... Jason Clare has become embroiled in a school funding war with the states, which is a mess of Labor's own making."

Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe said the results were a "damning indictment on the failure of governments to fully fund public schools".

"Australia cannot close achievement gaps without closing resourcing gaps. It is long past time for governments to close the resource gaps impacting on public schools," she said.

"Teachers and education support personnel work very hard to cater for all of their students' needs but they must be backed by governments."