By Jordan Baker
More than 40 per cent of year 1 students do not read as well as they should and the problem is most acute among disadvantaged children, with two in three failing to meet the expected standard in the first statewide NSW phonics check.
But the results of the check – held in public schools after a term of remote learning – were an improvement on a trial the year before, in which almost one in six students did not reach the expected achievement level of 28 correct answers from 40 questions.
Year 1 students at Oatley Public School use their knowledge of phonics to spell on their whiteboards.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Education Minister Sarah Mitchell, who mandated the phonics screening check, will tell The Sydney Morning Herald Schools Summit on Tuesday that the improvement in results from 2020 to 2021 shows the importance of using teaching techniques that are backed by evidence.
“If we use evidence to drive reforms we get improvements in student outcomes,” she said.
“If we work with schools, if wet set evidence-based targets and work with them to see outcomes improve, like in the phonics test, we’ll see massive uplift across the system which is what we want as Education Minister.”
Reading levels in Australia are flat-lining. NAPLAN data from 2019 – the latest available – shows one in five year 9 students cannot read well enough after 10 years of school, a figure that has barely improved over a decade. Some children arrive in high school with the reading levels of an early primary student.
NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell.Credit: James Alcock
The phonics screening check, based on a test first introduced in the United Kingdom, is designed to assess whether students have grasped the fundamentals of using phonics to decode 40 words, and trigger more support if they have not.
It involves teachers spending five to seven minutes with each year 1 student to listen to how they blend sounds. Some words are nonsensical, such as “flisp”, and are included to ensure students don’t just recognise words because they have been repeatedly exposed to them.
The 2020 trial involved about a third of NSW primary schools so cannot be directly compared to the compulsory 2021 test, which was held in term four after students missed a term of face-to-face lessons.
In the 2021 check, 56.7 per cent of children answered 28 or more questions correctly and the average number of correct answers was 26.5.
Students from the top quartile of advantage – those with professional, highly educated parents – were twice as likely (76 per cent) to meet or exceed the expected level of 28 than those in the bottom quartile (32 per cent).
Not quite 30 per cent of Aboriginal students met the expected score, and more students in the city (60.9 per cent) met the standard than those living in inner regional (45), outer regional (39) or remote (31) areas.
The reading wars over whether children learn best by focusing on learning letter-sound combinations, which is known as phonics, or being exposed to words, or balanced literacy, have raged for decades.
In the past few years NSW has endorsed a phonics-based approach, which will be embedded in its new kindergarten to year 2 curriculum, after internal Department of Education research found balanced literacy to be less effective. But the debate still continues in other jurisdictions, such as Victoria, and in other systems, such as some NSW Catholic dioceses.
Jennifer Buckingham, a phonics advocate and director of strategy at reading company MultiLit, said the NSW results were similar to the outcome of the first screening check in other jurisdictions, such as the UK.
“Next year will give a sense of the K-2 syllabus and how it might have improved things,” she said.
Dr Buckingham said there was no reason why disadvantaged children should not read as well as advantaged ones, given that research showed all children could reach benchmarks with high-quality reading instruction in their classroom. The idea that children learn to read by being surrounded by books has been discredited.
“Vocabulary is a different thing, it’s more related to socio-economic status, because of the different use of language in the home, home literacy and home language environment is harder to bridge,” she said.
She said that with phonics instruction, those things could be ameliorated, and that the advantage gap was one thing she hoped would significantly change next year. “All children in low [socio-educational] schools should be getting really high-quality phonics instruction,” Dr Buckingham said.
South Australia was the first jurisdiction to begin the screening test in 2018. Since it was introduced, the number of students able to meet the benchmark has grown from 43 per cent to 67 per cent last year.
The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.