It takes a village: Changing reading instruction in the Education State.

 

                                                                    Image source: PPT stock

This week was an historic one for the state of Victoria, with our Education Minister and Deputy Premier, the Hon Ben Carroll MP announcing a major change in government policy settings pertaining to reading instruction. You can access the Department’s media release Making Best Practice Common Practice in The Education State as well as reading about it via open access links such as this one from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Students at Victorian state schools will all be taught reading using phonics from 2025. The centrepiece of this announcement is that as of 2025, systematic synthetic phonics will be mandated in all classrooms in the first three years of school. This means Victoria is effectively the last Australian state or territory to formally abandon balanced literacy, an approach I have written about previously, here and here, and have described as being “neither fish or fowl” – it is not whole language and nor is it structured, explicit literacy teaching. It is unfortunately whatever the person using the term wants it to be.

Many people and organisations, including Hedi Gregory and Sarah Gole, and their team at Dyslexia Support Victoria, countless individual school leaders, teachers, allied health professionals, and parents, and of course the La Trobe SOLAR Lab team (including our PhD students, Master of Education students, and dedicated tutors), ably supported by the La Trobe Education Dean, Professor Joanna Barbousas have contributed to this outcome. Alison Clarke OAM deserves a special mention in this regard, as she has campaigned for many years via persuasive, “cut-through” blog-posts, as well as making high quality resources available to classroom teachers, parents, and clinicians – often at no charge. Dr Jennifer Buckingham, FRSN CF has provided countless policy briefs to support decision-makers and practitioners, and Jordana Hunter and Amy Haywood from the Grattan Institute contributed their highly influential Reading Guarantee Report earlier in 2024. Dr Jenny Donovan and her team at AERO have been synthesising evidence for policy-makers and practitioners since the establishment of AERO in 2020, and folk like Lyn Stone have been out there treading the boards in schools, tirelessly providing professional learning to teachers, left high and dry by initial teacher education that missed the mark on reading and spelling instruction. Dr Nathaniel Swain's Think Forward Educators has been a grassroots and low-budget source of high-quality professional learning for teachers and school leaders. Several Victorian primary school principals who have been early adopters well ahead of the curve, have been generous in supporting peers in other schools to make changes. Jo Rogers, a retired Victorian primary teacher has written countless opinion pieces for The Age, such as this one as well as making inquiry submissions, such as this one. Let’s not forget too, the Australian children’s authors, who’ve backed this in over the long haul, such as Jackie French and  Sally Rippin.

Many in the mainstream media have also contributed considered and incisive articles and commentary to the public debate in recent years, with names such as Adam Carey at The Age, Rebecca Urban, formerly of The Australian, Louise Milligan at the ABC, Ellen Fanning of Radio National, Dr Norman Swan of Radio National, Lucy Carroll at the Sydney Morning Herald, Robyn Grace at The Age,  Jordan Baker at The Sydney Morning Herald, and Sarah Duggan at Education HQ, coming to mind. A little further afield, but no less influential, was Emily Hanford, and her award-winning Sold a Story podcast. 

These are not exhaustive lists and I apologise to any people or organisations I have unwittingly overlooked.

Less helpful in this debate, has been the Victorian Branch of the Australian Education Union, that released a statement this week denouncing the Minister’s backing of evidence-based reading instruction and claiming a lack of respect for the professional autonomy of teachers. My message to the union, which I tried to post on their Facebook page, but strangely, comments were “restricted”, is this:

Unfortunately, the AEU seems to have a definition of "professionalism" that is at odds with the rest of the community's. Professions which are held in high esteem at community-level are those whose practitioners are mandated to operate within narrow parameters and are held to account (often publicly) when they do not do so - think pilots, medical practitioners, nurses, psychologists, engineers, etc. They do not get to "choose their own adventure" in the way that schools and teachers have been able to with respect to selecting from a buffet of approaches on reading instruction.

The Education Minister's decision will result in reduced workloads and improved professional satisfaction for teachers - two key outcomes that unions are normally invested in. This has already been demonstrated in schools that have adopted this teaching model, without any additional resourcing. The Education Minister took advice from a number of teachers and school leaders, including attending an event on a Saturday, attended by some 360 passionate and committed teachers from across the State, and fielding spontaneous questions from the audience - without exception demanding greater rigour and a requirement from government that reading be taught explicitly and systematically in every school, not just those who happen to choose to do so.

The Union has a fantastic opportunity here to be on the right side of history and be part of a major overhaul in which everyone can be a winner: students, teachers, parents, and the community at large. In all likelihood, others will be rolling up their sleeves and working around the union rather than with them.

Questions put to me by journalists this week were in the main, well-informed, but there’s still a number of misconceptions that we need to address.

First and foremost, we need some clarity around what the term “phonics” means. I prefer to see the word “phonics” used as an adjective, with a noun to follow, either knowledge or instruction. Phonics knowledge is what we want children to acquire, through their instruction and through the process of statistical learning, about how speech and print map to each other in rule-governed and morphologically patterned ways in English. Phonics instruction, however, is what is delivered by teachers, in order to support this learning by students. There are a number of different approaches to phonics instruction and they vary enormously with respect to:

·         *The teacher knowledge they require about how the writing system works in English.

·         *The extent to which children are taught explicitly, with a scope and sequence.

So, we need to work hard to help the media (and by extension, the public) understand that this is not a debate about “phonics Vs no phonics”. Every primary teacher in Victoria already teaches phonics, but there is currently enormous variation in how this is done, given that responsibility for reading instruction has been devolved to individual schools. I have written previously about the fact that I believe school leaders should be demanding less rather than more autonomy on this, and that sentiment was loud and clear at the recent SOTLA- La Trobe event in Melbourne, attended by Education Minister the Hon. Ben Carroll, at which Emily Hanford was the keynote speaker. School leaders are not able or required to choose their own adventure on child safety or prevention of anaphylaxis (both issues on which evidence and recommendations continue to evolve), yet this has been the case on the core business for schools of reading instruction. This makes no sense and is the fundamental turn-around in this new policy.

So - what lies ahead?

Although there was rightly a sense of celebration and relief at this week’s announcement, we must not be starry-eyed about the challenges inherent in the implementation of new practices and equally importantly, the de-implementation of practices that need to be removed, because they are in the balanced literacy DNA – i.e., they are part of an eclectic bundle of approaches that teachers have been forced to fall back on when not adequately prepared for reading instruction by their initial teacher education.

Many schools are already on this journey, and some are established in their new practice, with data (academic and wellbeing) to attest to its effectiveness. From those who have started the journey, we at La Trobe hear many stories of the steep hill teachers have to climb to acquire new knowledge that translates into new practices. We also hear about how difficult it can be to relinquish practices that are balanced literacy comfort-zones. Here I am thinking of the following (as examples), which will all need to be de-implemented as part of this new policy:

·         *The use of three cueing strategies for teaching students to identify unfamiliar words.

·         *Sending banks of sight-words home with children for their parents to teach to them as visual wholes.

·         *The use of predictable, levelled texts as early instructional supports.

·         *Use of “letter of the week”.

·         *Use of Running Records as the go-to progress monitoring tool.

·         *The use of cute but trivialising and demeaning “strategies” like Lips the Fish, Skippy Frog, and Eagle Eye – see more in this 2024 open access paper by Kearns and Borkenhagen.

In their place, we will be looking to see:

·         *Teachers gaining expert knowledge about how the English writing system works and how oral language and written language both relate to and differ from each other.

·         *Teachers trained in, and applying one of many evidence-aligned systematic synthetic phonics programs for initial teaching of novices about how the writing system works.

·         *Reading instruction and writing instruction being closely aligned so that mastery of the English spelling system occurs for both.

·         *The use of “decodable” (phonically controlled) texts in the early stages of reading instruction, to enable children to practice the elements of the writing code to which they have been exposed, and in turn, develop the essential skills of automaticity and fluency that contribute to reading comprehension.

·        *Explicit teaching of vocabulary, sentence structure, inferencing, and background knowledge, so that the upper strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope are being developed alongside code knowledge, from the outset.  

·         *The use of rigorous progress monitoring tools that have strong psychometric properties (validity and reliability) and articulate to instructional decisions and actions. This should include the introduction of a full-scale Phonics Screening Check, not a light-touch version that under-samples the knowledge and skills in question.

I was asked by a journalist this week “How will we know we have got this right?

We will know we got this right in five years’ time if policy makers and academics are no longer falling for the fallacy of the Golden Mean and assuming that all ideas about reading instruction are worthy of a seat at the table just because some stakeholders loudly assert opinions not backed by evidence. There may well be many ways of teaching a child to read, but that does not mean they are equally effective at a population level. Government policy has to be about population level prevention of difficulties and promotion of success.

We will know we have got this right when we see gatherings of highly motivated teachers at professional learning events (invariably in unpaid time on weekends) such as Sharing Best Practice and researchED focusing their discussion on the details and nuances of classroom practice, not on the demoralising and exhausting struggles of arguing for better practice and working around colleagues who resist change – sometimes because they are anxious about it and sometimes because they have not yet had an opportunity to fully understand its rationale.

We will also know we got it right when we see public health thinking, via Response to Intervention (and its broader “home” Multi Tiered Systems of Support) employed as the conceptual framework for the ongoing planning, delivery, and review of reading instruction in Victorian schools.

We will know we have got this right when we no longer need to despairingly reflect on the poor translation into practice of recommendations such as those of the 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, that has gathered metaphorical dust on virtual shelves for nearly 20 years.

No society can afford (or justify) the level of reading failure described in the recent Grattan Reading Guarantee Report and no system can resource the intervention services such levels of failure necessitate. Let’s not forget too, the downstream consequences of low literacy in the form of mental health/substance abuse problems, unemployment, involvement with the criminal justice system, and unstable housing. These are all burdens unfairly distributed to children who start from behind in the first place.

As the adult village around our children, we must therefore, not squander the opportunity afforded by the Education Minister’s announcement this week.   

© Pamela Snow (2024)