Declining rates of high-level maths in VCE are contributing to Australia’s widening skills gap but new Swinburne University research may have found why.
Dr Emily Cook, Swinburne STEM expert, said the number of students selecting higher-level maths subjects in the final years of high school had been steadily dropping for decades. As a result, Australia’s engineering skills gap and labour shortage was the highest it had been for more than a decade.
Dr Cook is the lead author of new research which she claimed may have found the reasons why and how these barriers are locking promising students out of in-demand jobs.
“We need to meet students where they are to show the benefits of maths,” she said in a media release on 22 October 2025.
“There is not a single decision point students make about their VCE subjects; they are constantly re-evaluating what subjects suit them best all the way through their studies”.
Dr Cook’s study was reported in the Australasian Journal of Engineering Education on 13 October 2025.
It found that balancing workload, stress, enjoyment and motivation were the key factors influencing interest in high level maths.
Some found maths too hard, while others thought it was not challenging enough. Others hadn’t realised they needed maths, or could do it, until it was too late and had locked themselves out of pathways.
Flaw in STEM pipeline
A major theme was around the challenge of picking up maths again after time away.
“Maths methods in particular was found to be really hard to catch up on if classes were missed, so several students struggled if they missed time for reasons related to health or other subject pressures,” Dr Cook said.
“This highlights a serious flaw in the STEM pipeline: if a student has to drop down to a lower mathematics subject, they are abandoning the tertiary and career pathways that higher-level mathematics provides, all because of a broken arm.”
Along with parents, teachers were also important influences in ongoing decision-making processes, both implicitly through role modelling and explicitly through direct guidance, advice and rules.
Dr Cooks said that, “while streaming of who goes into what classes throughout schooling may be perceived as in the student’s interests, it also blocks students who discover an interest in and motivation for mathematics later to find they have ‘missed the boat’”.
“Known issues like a lack of maths teachers, university pre-requisites and the complexity of the ATAR system also have an effect,” she said.
But there was no one solution on how to solve the crisis, she added.
“Maths is important as it is needed in many university degrees, but also develops problem solving skills for the workforce, where engineering, mining, finance, health and data science require strong mathematical knowledge,” Dr Cook said.
“Setting up systems that allow and encourage more students to choose higher level maths would benefit all Australia.”
The study reported that in Australia from 2010 to 2022 the percentage of year 12 students taking advanced maths had dropped from 10.9% to 9.0%, and intermediate maths from 21.5% to 17.7%. The proportion of students taking any maths had decreased from 71.6% to 67.9%.
This study used semi-structured interviews to explore the choices of year 11 and 12 mathematics subjects that had been made by 62 students starting an engineering degree.
