An education dean’s perspective on adopting a scientific approach to literacy

Victoria made the right move by endorsing a structured literacy approach to teaching reading in schools.

For the first time in Victoria, we have an Education Minister in Ben Carroll who has examined the research on reading instruction and engaged with teachers, education stakeholders and system leaders to bravely put on the table a structured literacy mandate that is informed by research.

The new policy announced last month, Making Best Practice Common Practice In The Education State, both requires and supports teachers and system leaders who are ready to make a difference by implementing structured literacy approaches that put students’ needs first.

This approach is informed by decades of scientific research, including three national inquiries into the teaching of reading since 2000 and recent publications such as the Grattan Institute’s 2024 Reading Guarantee Report.

At my own university, La Trobe, we have over the last few years successfully helped schools adopt this established, scientific approach to improving how children are taught to read through our Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab.

By contrast, there is no research that demonstrates a superiority of balanced literacy – still used by many schools in Victoria – over structured, explicit literacy instruction, and it is not the go-to intervention when children fall behind.

Joanna Barbousas

While this change may initially appear daunting for hardworking teachers, principals and schools, the evidence shows us that in the medium-to-long term a scientific approach will save time and produce tangible benefits for students and teachers.

I think we can all agree that understanding how to read and having skills and knowledge about the writing and language system is core to providing a foundation for young people’s future engagement with knowledge and learning. The reality is that a balanced literacy framework is not working for enough children.

Rather than examining this and taking an analytical approach to current practices, there seems to still be a commitment by some to protecting a patch that is no longer fit for purpose.

Most professions – for example, medicine and psychology – analyse core materials and knowledge of their discipline to assess their validity and reliability and how well they have survived the test of time through implementation. This needs to apply to the profession of teaching too.

It is proper to look at all data on literacy achievement in this country, not only the data that fits our ideology. For decades, the balanced literary approach has been given a free ride to prop up prevailing ideological positions about reading. This has led to teachers developing a commitment to the aesthetics of comfortable spaces for learning, a passion for reading books to children in the hope that this turns them into readers, and a reliance on predictable texts for guessing-based reading instruction.

This “autonomous” approach has been at the expense of teachers developing a specialised understanding of the cognitive and linguistic processes that lay the foundations for proficient readers to emerge.

Now is a good time to talk about the origin of the word “autonomy”. Autonomy is a word being thrown around by some stakeholders to explain why the minister’s approach is so ‘wrong’ for Victorian teachers, ‘they will lose their autonomy’. The word’s origin is Greek from the word αυτονομία – αυτοs, meaning “self” and νομos, meaning “laws” (discourse). Essentially, the Greek origin of the word reminds us that in order to be autonomous you must be open to examining the principles, or “laws” that underpin your autonomy.

The new evidence-based direction that is being rolled out in Victoria in structured literacy are “laws” that have been developed in structures/systems and endorsed by people in these systems. They have been tried and tested and we have the evidence both in Australia and overseas to show that this more scientific approach works.

These “laws” are legitimate to the teaching profession, and as such, system leaders and in turn, teachers are being asked to exercise their “autonomy” – to take a magnifying glass to the practices that frame the work they are doing in literacy. This means examining, without bias, whether the validity and reliability of their existing ‘laws’ are actually meeting the needs of all learners.

If they were, we would not still be having this debate in 2024.

Professor Joanna Barbousas is dean of the School of Education at La Trobe University.