Catholic schools move away from whole language-based teaching in switch to phonics

One Catholic school system is hoping that evidence-backed phonics teaching will help turn around students’ poor reading results.

Rebecca Brady and students Remi Follett, Oliver Hawkins, Imogen Ralston and Angus Priest. Picture: Sean Davey

Catholic schools across Canberra and southern NSW will implement evidence-backed phonics teaching from next year as part of a system-wide push to improve students’ literacy outcomes.

In a shift away from whole language-based approaches favoured across the sector, Canberra Goulburn Catholic Education has introduced a new policy on reading instruction, which will require all primary schools to introduce a systematic synthetic phonics approach to ensure children are explicitly taught how to read.

Systematic synthetic phonics, also known as blended phonics, involves teaching students to pronounce the sounds associated with letters in isolation before being taught to combine the sounds to form words. It has a growing body of evidence pointing to it being the most effective method for teaching children how to read.

The push, which is the first initiative of the archdiocese broader Catalyst program aimed at improving teaching and learning, comes after a review at the end of 2019 found an unacceptably high proportion of students were struggling with reading.

Catholic Education Canberra Goulburn director Ross Fox said data provided by about 40 schools revealed that one third of kindergarten students were below the expected benchmark for reading, while almost half of Year 1 students did not meet the benchmark.

The situation was worse in Year 2, Mr Fox said, with 62 per cent of students falling short of the “independent reader” benchmark.

“The evidence is pretty clear that a school should be able to get 95 per cent of students to a given target through their normal classroom instruction, so we knew that we could be doing better,” he said.

“Helping our children master the skill of reading is an absolute fundamental role of primary school education. So as part of this overhaul we’ve set a goal of having every one of our 21,000 students become a competent reader for their age level.”

Mr Fox said the new policy was heavily influenced by a theory known as the “simple view of reading”, which proposes that reading comprehension depends on a student’s ability to sound out the words and their understanding of the meaning of those words. 

Despite significant empirical evidence supporting the simple view of reading and importance of decoding skills, many schools continue to favour whole language-derived balanced literacy teaching, which preferences word memorisation and guessing strategies over phonics skills.

As part of the push, about 200 teachers across the Canberra Goulburn region are undergoing professional training covering the key reading areas of phonics, ­phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency and reading comprehension.

Primary schools within the archdiocese will also join NSW state schools in participating in the annual Year 1 phonics screening check, after taking part in the pilot program this year.

Mr Fox said most schools and teachers enthusiastically supported the plan. However, he said there was some scepticism, which was understandable when asking teachers to make a significant change.

“A number of other diocese are interested in what we’re doing and watching closely,” he said.

“We think we are doing the right thing.”

St Bernard’s Primary School at Bateman’s Bay has had a head start in implementing systematic phonics teaching and principal Jo Wain said it had vastly improved students’ outcomes.

Three years ago, almost half of the kindergarten class were performing below benchmark. Now 85 per cent are above.

“It has been fantastic to be supported in this way and have all the teachers learning this approach together so we can build the knowledge of evidence-based reading instruction,” said principal Jo Wain.

“We are working as a team … across the school to improve the reading standards all our students achieve.”