Writing on the wall as poor literacy standards targeted

Shockingly, 47 per cent of Tasmania’s adult males and 53 per cent of females are considered ‘functionally illiterate’. And the impacts are devastating.

Meg Bignell with her son Ed, 15, who has dyslexia, at their home in Hobart. Picture: Peter Mathew

Matthew Mansfield loves to cook for his three children, who frequently request his signature chorizo and bacon pasta bake.

However, it wasn’t long ago that the 36-year-old from Hobart would have struggled to follow the instructions of a simple recipe.

“I could read three or four-letter words, but not much else,” he says. “I’d get to a six or seven-letter word and just give up.”

Illiteracy has plagued Mansfield for most of his life. At school, he’d often struggle to concentrate and would “play up a lot” as a result. By the age of 16, he’d fallen in with the “wrong crowd” and was fast becoming, as he describes it, “a menace to society”.

Drug addiction led to crime, which culminated in time in prison. It was only after getting out of jail five years ago, when he came into contact with speech pathologist and criminologist Rosie Martin, that he learnt to read.

Mansfield’s story is sadly not uncommon, says Martin, whose charity Connect42 helps to improve life outcomes for people in the criminal justice system by developing their language and literacy skills.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 47 per cent of Tasmania’s adult males and 53 per cent of females are considered “functionally illiterate”, meaning they struggle with the basic skills needed to read a form or brochure or understand a newspaper article.

It’s a statistic that is both surprising and alarming for a country as wealthy as Australia.

“It’s a pretty devastating experience: to be surrounded by language yet to not be able to access it,” Martin says.

“It does have a damaging impact on a person’s self-esteem. In the case of young people … some will internalise it and engage in negative self talk and they will be at risk of mental health problems.

“Others, the externalisers, push outwards. They might display behaviour problems and their teachers might find them difficult to manage.

“That’s the group that is vulnerable to negative influences and persuasion and, for some, it can tip into criminal activity.”

A proposed National Early Language and Literacy Strategy, released last week, revealed that up to 50 per cent of male offenders experienced language difficulties and 60 per cent of prison entrants had left school by Year 10.

Awareness of the pressing need to improve the state’s lagging literacy rates is growing, largely due to the work of Martin and like-minded individuals behind the Tasmanian 100% Literacy Alliance such as economist Saul Eslake and workforce demographer Lisa Denny.

The group’s advocacy ensured the issue was at the forefront of both Labor and Liberal party policies leading into the May state election.

The Gutwein government’s recently appointed Education Minister, Sarah Courtney, inherited her predecessor’s literacy target: that all Tasmanian Year 7 students meet the national minimum reading standard by 2030. The government appointed members to a new Literacy Advisory Panel that will make recommendations to inform and build upon existing literacy approaches and supports in the early years, schools and adult learning environments.

Denny would like to see more urgency from the government, pointing to the 2021 NAPLAN results, which confirmed an “alarming” decline in Tasmanian students’ literacy skills, particularly among secondary students.

Both Year 7 and Year 9 reading scores have declined since the test began in 2008, while the proportion of students meeting the national minimum standard has fallen in Year 7 and Year 9 for reading and grammar and also for punctuation.

In 2021, just 86 per cent of Tasmanian Year 9 students reached the national minimum standard in reading – the lowest of all jurisdictions bar the Northern Territory – down from 93 per cent in 2008.

According to Denny, Tasmania’s poor educational outcomes tend to be attributed to a “higher proportion of people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds”.

“There is a tendency to blame parents, with suggestions that parents do not value education in Tasmania and therefore their children are not engaged in learning nor do they aspire to higher education and training opportunities,” she says.

“Tasmania has the most regionally dispersed population in Australia and until recently our high schools only went to year 10.

“Furthering education beyond grade 10 meant that young people had to leave their families and communities to complete year 11 and 12.

“The extension of high schools to years 11 and 12 by the current Tasmanian government has provided the opportunity for young people to stay in their community to complete their schooling.”

With one-in-four Tasmanian children growing up in a family where no parent works, the Tasmanian 100% Literacy Alliance has advocated for greater wraparound support services and intervention programs to improve young people’s engagement with education and literacy outcomes.

It has also called for phonics screening to be mandatory across the state school system – as it is in South Australia and now NSW – and for better support for schools to implement evidence-backed structured literacy teaching, which has an initial focus on the explicit teaching of phonics decoding skills.

Such an approach is critical for students like 15-year-old Ed Bignell, who was diagnosed with dyslexia in his second year of primary school.

The Bignells, dairy farmers from Tasmania’s southeast, made the tough decision to leave their small country town and relocate near a school that offered explicit phonics teaching in order for Ed to get the support he needed.

That, in addition to fortnightly tutoring with a speech pathologist and homework closely supervised by mum Meg Bignell, has meant he’s been able to keep pace in the classroom.

“His reading is still slow and quite effortful,” Bignell says.

“Occasionally, he’ll get upset but then he just goes and gets on with it. We try to keep his tyres pumped up in different ways. He loves outdoor ed and he’s fantastic at fixing things.”

Ed has his sights set on studying agricultural science so he can become a farmer, “because it’s what my dad does and I’d like to help him out”.

“I like machinery and animals and being outside,” he says.

“I’ve ridden a motorbike since I was six and learnt to drive a car when I was ten. It’s hard to explain why I love farming, it’s just always been my thing.”

Mansfield’s life is also looking up. When he’s not carving things up in the kitchen, he’s working several days a week in a cleaning and maintenance job and is helping his children stay on track with their own education.

In a fortnight, he will mark 500 days drug-free.

“I have a different mindset these days,” he says. “I see three positives for every negative. It’s great to feel some confidence about how things are now.”