The Productivity Commission interim report on the review of the national school reform agreement said states and territories should focus more on closing education equity gaps and improving student wellbeing in the next intergovernmental agreement.

Social policy commissioner Natalie Siegel-Brown said teachers' workloads had increased over time.

"The number one reason that teachers cite any intention to leave the profession, it's not because of pay but rather workload and burnout," Ms Siegel-Brown said.

On average, teachers spend 40 per cent of their time on face-to-face teaching, with planning, marking, communicating with parents, administration, collaboration with colleagues and student counselling making up the remaining workload.

"There are a range of tasks which we think may be low-value tasks for a teacher," Ms Siegel-Brown said.

"We think there should be some assessment about whether you could redeploy this across the school community so that teachers are much more focused on what we call the high-value tasks."

About five to nine per cent of Australian students do not meet the minimum literacy and numeracy standards through NAPLAN, but 85 per cent of this cohort don't belong to the current priority equity groups.

These groups are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, students from rural and remote areas, students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and students with disabilities.

The commission found some groups needed more attention, especially students living in out-of-home care and students with English as an additional language.

Ms Siegel-Brown said the new agreement needed to have reforms to address equity in a broad sense, in partnership with different equity groups.

"We found that there are still major barriers of school and social exclusion, still issues around recognition of Indigenous cultures and Indigenous knowledges.

"There's still issues around recognising the unique abilities of students with disability."

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There is currently no data recorded on how children and young people with a disability are faring at school.

The states and territories have failed to implement a unique student identifier to track students throughout their school years, despite this being first proposed in 2009. Ms Seigel-Brown said if they couldn't deliver on this part of the 2018 agreement, the states and territories needed to explain why.

"We would argue that governments need to confirm that the concept of a unique student identifier remains a priority, and if there are differences that governments have between each other on data and privacy, they need to resolve those issues."

She said social and emotional wellbeing was a strong determinant of educational outcomes and should also be a focus of the next agreement.

"People think of it as a fluffy concept. But in fact, your state of wellbeing has a very direct impact on your brain's capacity to learn," she said.

"There are a lot of things that teachers and leaders do which either make wellbeing worse or improve it. We've really attempted to focus on the factors that are within a school's control around a student's wellbeing."

The commission is seeking submission by October 21 to inform its final report.

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