By Robyn Grace
One in three Australian children could remain below grade-level expectations for reading in the next decade unless governments commit to strong targets to lift literacy rates and pledge to end the reading wars, education researchers say.
The Grattan Institute has called for a “revolution” to increase the level of proficient readers by 15 percentage points to 83 per cent in the next 10 years and 90 per cent in the long term, saying governments and school sector leaders are not doing enough to address Australia’s reading performance problem.
Reading success story: Principal Rhys Coulson and students at Templestowe Heights Primary School.Credit: Justin McManus
Almost one-third of Australian children across years 3, 5, 7 and 9 failed to meet new proficiency standards for literacy in last year’s NAPLAN tests. In Victoria, with its high levels of advantaged students, that number is one in four.
In a report released on Sunday, Grattan Institute education program director Jordana Hunter said decades of disagreement about how to teach reading and lack of explicit guidance to schools from state and federal governments were key causes of the problem.
The report has already been met with support from Federal Education Minister Jason Clare, who said on Friday the current National School Reform Agreement didn’t include the targets or reforms to “move the needle”.
“The new agreement we strike this year needs to properly fund schools and tie that funding to the sort of things that work,” he said.
Grattan has called on governments and education sector leaders to commit to structured literacy - which favours a systematic, evidence-based approach to teach all children the building blocks of letters and words - over balanced literacy, which includes strategies to guess words based on pictures and context.
The institute also wants states to mandate a nationally consistent year 1 phonics screening check tabled in parliament each year to publicly report on schools’ progress; regulated curriculum materials to create consistency in how children are taught; and small-group tutoring to help students who are struggling.
The report said much of the workload fell to already-stretched principals, who were expected not only to do their own research but to lead change management in their schools. But it said once clear policies had been set, principals should be held accountable if reading progress was poor.
The Australian curriculum moved to evidence-informed reading instruction for the early years in 2022. Victoria, which uses its own adaptation of the curriculum, allows schools an autonomous approach and advises a mix of evidence-informed and balanced literacy approaches. It also uses its own year 1 phonics test, which experts have dismissed as “hopeless”.
Victoria’s Education Department website lists a target of a 25 per cent improvement in years 5 and 9 reading results by 2025 but the goal relies on the previous NAPLAN scale and results have not been publicly reported since 2019.
Grattan’s Amy Haywood said governments could expect stagnant results for reading if they continued to depend on action at individual schools instead of changing policies.
“We should be relying on the departments and sector leaders to have done the research and [provided] clear and consistent advice to schools,” she said. “Parents should be in a position where they can actually trust that we’ve got a highly reliable system where their child goes to school and that school will be able to implement strategies that give them the best chance of reading success.”
Grattan’s six-step ‘Reading Guarantee’
1. Pledge that at least 90 per cent of Australian students will become proficient readers.
2. Give principals and teachers specific guidelines on how to teach reading in line with the evidence on what works best.
3. Provide schools with the high-quality curriculum materials and assessments that teachers need to teach reading well.
4. Require schools to do universal screening of students’ reading skills and help struggling students to catch-up.
5. Ensure teachers have the knowledge and skills they need, through extra training, and by appointing Literacy Instructional Specialists in schools.
6. Mandate a nationally consistent year 1 phonics screening check, and regularly review schools’ and principals’ performance on teaching their students to read.
At Templestowe Heights Primary School, in Melbourne’s north-east, COVID lockdowns were the catalyst for a shift to a structured approach.
Principal Rhys Coulson said it became clear early in remote learning that students couldn’t sit through a normal 60-minute reading lesson, and teachers needed to “cut out all the waffle” to provide explicit instructions in short bursts.
The results of the following year’s phonics test spoke for themselves. In 2021, the year before the school implemented structured reading, 24 per cent of year 1s were categorised as struggling. In 2022, it was 2 per cent.
The number of students in the fluent category grew from 55 per cent to 87.
“I always felt this was the right way to go. But I didn’t know just how much of an impact you could potentially have,” he said.
Templestowe Heights is now eighth-highest in the state for NAPLAN reading results. Students identified as needing intervention are those not yet in the exceeding or strong categories.
Coulson said the school had written its own curriculum materials and often gave tours to other principals interested in emulating their approach. But he said not everyone was sold, particularly those already achieving good results with other approaches.
Victoria’s Education Minister Ben Carroll said the state’s students were the strongest performers in the country for year 3 NAPLAN reading results and many of the actions recommended in the Grattan report were already core features of Victoria’s approach to reading instruction.
Carroll did not answer questions related to targets or guidance but said the state’s new English curriculum had a stronger focus on phonics and he was open to considering how Victoria’s mandatory year 1 phonics assessment might be strengthened. Victoria has already invested heavily in catch-up tutoring.
Opposition education spokeswoman Jess Wilson said it was time for Victoria to drop its “phonics-phobia” and follow other states in adopting it across the board.
“The ‘choose your own adventure’ approach to teaching reading in Victorian schools is failing students,” she said.
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