Principal claims phonics lessons are a winner

A move by a primary school to introduce systematic synthetic phonics has been vindicated by the latest NAPLAN results.

Bentleigh West principal Steven Capp with Year 3 students, from left, Charlotte Maddison, Lenny Burt, Will Austin, Allegra Meszaros and Lola Jack. Picture: Aaron Francis

A Melbourne principal whose students made significant literacy gains since the school adopted an explicit phonics program has likened the ongoing debate around reading instruction to ­arguing over the existence of gravity.

A move by Bentleigh West ­Primary School to introduce systematic synthetic phonics three years ago has been vindicated by the latest NAPLAN results, revealing its Year 3 mean spelling score has risen 16 per cent over the period. Reading and writing scores are up 7 per cent and grammar and punctuation have risen 10 per cent.

The results are meaningful, according to principal Steven Capp, as this year’s cohort is the first to have been explicitly taught phonics — how to recognise and sound out the letters and letter groupings to form words — from their first day at school.

The improvement also means the Melbourne school no longer lags behind similar schools in terms of its NAPLAN scores.

“We’re in a high socio-economic area where the kids have pretty much been read to from birth, they have books in the home, they go out to museums on the weekend, so there was a real concern around why we had an issue with our students’ reading comprehension,” said Mr Capp.

“A lot of our practice was OK but we realised that we didn’t understand what good phonics instruction actually looked like.”

Previously, Bentleigh West took a balanced literacy approach to reading instruction, which takes a more incidental approach to teaching phonics skills in the context of a book, poem or song.

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As a result, many of the students at the school were struggling to decode words accurately, suggesting they lacked the knowledge of letter-sound relationships and patterns required to pronounce written words correctly.

Mr Capp, who joined the school in 2015, said one of the prep teachers had already begun employing systematic synthetic phonics instruction in her classroom and a decision was made to make it school-wide policy.

He said the new approach involved significant investment in teacher training, given that many, himself included, had not been taught how to teach reading while at university.

He said many teachers were also not familiar with the research into the acquisition of reading skills, much of which had come out of the dyslexia field, although that was starting to change.

As part of the school’s commitment to improving literacy, it also introduced the Year 1 phonics check advocated by the federal government, which helps identify students needing more support.

“I feel as though the evidence for synthetic phonics instruction is there and has been for a long time,” Mr Capp said, describing the ongoing “reading wars” as “like arguing whether gravity exists”.

“There’s this idea that phonics is all drill and kill, but it’s not,” he said. “Compare teaching reading to something like football training or tennis training. You’ve got to practise your forehand again and again. Can it be boring? Yeah. But good coaches, just like good teachers, make it fun.”

Centre for Independent Studies senior research fellow Jennifer Buckingham said Bentleigh West’s improved results showed what happens “when a school … relentlessly focuses on the evidence on how to teach so that all children learn to read”.

Dr Buckingham’s previous research into the field has shown that many schools claiming to be explicitly teaching phonics are instead employing a balanced literacy approach, which is proven to be less effective.

Mr Capp said the upshot of the change was happier and less stressed teachers, and students who wanted to read.