SA students to take phonics tests, but teachers sound off in protest

More than 14,000 Year 1 students across South Australia will undergo checks from today to ascertain their basic phonics skills.

Reception and Year 1 teacher Evana Loucas with student Eva Guy, 6, at Gilles Street Primary School in Adelaide. Picture: Tracey Nearmy

More than 14,000 Year 1 students across South Australia will undergo checks from today to ascertain their basic phonics skills, as the state attempts to arrest its declining literacy standards.

Until the end of this month, public primary school teachers will conduct one-on-one phonics-screening checks with students, testing them on their ability to discern the sounds that comprise words — an essential foundation skill for learning to read.

The check is based on a similar program rolled out in Britain six years ago. It has been strongly resisted by teachers’ unions, however, who have labelled it another “high-stakes” test based on the ­assumption that teachers are not assessing their students already.

SA, which lags other mainland states in most NAPLAN categories, is the first state to heed the federal government’s calls for ­nationwide phonics screening.

Education Minister John Gardner said such screenings had been used in Britain since 2012, resulting in dramatic improvement across the education system.

“A strong start in literacy is the essential foundation upon which a student’s subsequent success is built, and we know that phonics is one of the ‘big six’ reading components and a foundational literacy skill,” Mr Gardner said.

“To improve our education system as a whole, we must put literacy first for all students.”

Explicit phonics instruction, which teaches children to break down words into simple sounds, and blend sounds to make words, is considered by researchers to be the most effective method of teaching children to read.

Despite this, its employment in schools varies as many teachers prefer a whole-language approach to teaching reading, where students pick up skills haphazardly in the context of a text. Any phonics instruction tends to be incidental.

A trail of the checks in SA last year found that on average, reception students (usually aged 5) were able to correctly identify just 11 out of 40 words, while the average score for Year 1 was 22 out of 40.

Words tested were a mix of real words — such as chin, deck, horn — and pseudo words — lig, mep, gax — which were chosen because they could not be read from memory and are considered a purer test of phonics ability.

Gilles Street Primary School principal Michael Bawden said he was pleased to be participating in the upcoming checks, which he expected would provide useful feedback to teachers regarding student literacy levels.

He said the school, in central Adelaide, had a strong focus on professional development to ensure its staff, such as reception and Year 1 teacher Evana Loucas, were able to deliver explicit systematic synthetic phonics instruction “as well as possible”.

“We don’t see it as a high-stakes test,” Mr Bawden said.

“The data collection will be used to help us find out where the children are at, and plan what it is we need to be teaching them next.”

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said he was proud to have championed the checks and hoped other states and territories followed SA’s lead.