Education tipping points and overstorys: a cautiously optimistic look back at 2024

There’s no such thing as a quiet year in education, but 2024 has been a notably non-quiet year, especially for reading instruction in the state of Victoria, Australia. On June 13, the Victorian Deputy Premier and Minister for Education, the Hon. Ben Carroll MP released a media statement signalling a new direction of travel for Victorian schools with respect to early years reading instruction. 

Specifically, the Department announced that it is mandating the use of 25 minutes of systematic synthetic phonics and phonemic awareness instruction in all Victorian classrooms, Foundation to Year 2, as of Term 1, 2025. I blogged back in June about the sustained advocacy by many, many stakeholders, over a number of years, that led to this historic announcement and again commend the Minister on this momentous and shape-shifting change in Victorian education. It has been refreshing and impressive in equal measure to see the quality of the work undertaken by the Department since the June announcement, culminating in the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0, high-quality lesson plans, discontinuation of the psychometrically weak English Online Interview, in favour of a robust and efficient Phonics Screening Check, and high-quality, accessible information for parents.

The usual colour and movement ensued from some quarters about this announcement. The Victorian Branch of the Australian Education Union immediately went into overdrive about Minister Carroll’s media release reflecting a lack of respect for teacher autonomy, and was critical of what was seen as a lack of consultation. I wonder if doctors and nurses who work in our public hospitals expect to be consulted via their unions on infection control protocols, or whether these are simply matters which policy makers, as consumers of evidence, should distil into knowledge-translation formats that ensure the best outcomes for end-users of the system, in that case, patients. It was disappointing that the education union made no reference to the needs of students. It missed an opportunity to be part of the education tipping point that could, over time, result in significant social justice benefits to all students, but most notably to those in equity groups who are constantly sold short when instruction is not of the highest and tightest possible calibre: students from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds, students from rural and regional areas, those from English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EALD) background, and/or those who have special education needs such as learning difficulties and other forms of neurodiversity that heighten, rather than diminish their need for high-quality instruction. Such students were a focus of the 2024 Grattan Institute Reading Guarantee Report authored by Jordana Hunter, Anika Stobart and Amy Haywood.

Recently, I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s 2024 Revenge of the Tipping Point, a sequel/companion text to his best-seller nearly a quarter of a century ago, The Tipping Point (2000). In the earlier volume, Gladwell referred to “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point” in how large-scale sociological change comes about. He argued that 80% of the work in this large-scale population-level shift is done by 20% of the players, people he categorised as connectors, mavens and persuaders. I didn’t use those actual terms in my June 2024 blogpost about the work that led up to Minister Carroll’s announcement, outside and inside the Ministry, but people familiar with this space will know they are a lens that can easily be laid over the work of the tireless advocates I referred to above.

So, yes, 2024 has seen the culmination of an evolving tipping point in reading instruction in Victoria. This was nowhere more evident than in early December when National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data was made public and primary schools in all sectors and locations, large and small, that had undertaken an instructional journey away from balanced literacy towards explicit and systematic literacy instruction were celebrating the “greening” of their data – relative to like-schools and relative to schools across the nation. If you need examples, look no further than (for example), Bentleigh West PS, Brandon Park PS, Canadian Lead PS, Chelsea Heights PS, Churchill PS, Dandenong North PS, and Horsham West PS. These results are no accident. Show me a school celebrating similar data shifts as a result of moving away from explicit teaching, towards balanced literacy and its bedfellows: student-led, discovery-learning, and low teacher-knowledge about the science of reading and the science of human learning. If you’re interested in how deeply teachers value acquiring this knowledge, check out this open-access study my colleagues and I published earlier this year on responses to online short courses offered through La Trobe University’s Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab to support teachers wanting to strengthen their reading instruction.

Another manifestation of the education tipping point has been the fact that Ballarat Clarendon College has returned the top Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) results for the third year in a row. This is also no accident and reflects the tipping process that was initiated quietly in that school some ten years ago under the leadership of its former principal, David Shepherd. As I understand it, senior leaders in the school interrogated their own data and the cognitive psychology literature on models of instruction that produce optimal outcomes for all students, regardless of their postcodes and personal or community-level starting points and went hard on applying this to a highly interactive model of explicit instruction in a low-variance way across year-levels and subject areas. It takes ten years to be an overnight success, and here they are: a school in regional Victoria outshining schools with “better” postcodes and much higher fees. To paraphrase an early 1990s US election slogan, it’s the instruction, stupid. There are fixed costs associated with having teachers in classrooms. How they spend their time (which of course, is more ethically thought of as students’ time), is the wild card, and high variance and high-quality are mutually incompatible, just as they are when we are running hospitals, building bridges, or manufacturing chocolate. Education is not, as some would have us believe, a “special case” when it comes to the imperative to apply high-quality evidence.

Coming back to Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell introduces an interesting new angle in this volume that I had not encountered before – the notion of the overstory. The overstory is the highest layer of foliage in a forest, making up its canopy. According to the World Rain Forests site, the overstory

……consists of giant emergent trees that tower above the surrounding canopy. These trees are huge, at least by tropical standards, some exceeding a height of 213 feet (65 meters) with horizontal limbs that stretch over 100 feet (30 m). These trees live in a different climate from the trees of the canopy. The air is much drier and moderately strong winds blow through their branches. These overstory species have adapted to take advantage of the wind for seed dispersal and typically the seeds of these species are light and equipped with some sort of mechanism to allow the winds to carry the seeds great distances away from the parent tree. 

This got me thinking about this new (to me) concept in relation to education and wondering what the overstory layer might be in the context of education. Let’s consider how this could look in relation to education, by retrofitting the forest layers to different strata of influence in education. I’ve done this in the diagram below:

 Image source

Until recently, I think it’s been fair to say that the bulk of the change processes and resulting tipping points in education have been happening in the shrub and forest floor layers (and to a lesser extent, the understory), reflecting bottom-up energy and focus – the work of sometimes highly organised and articulate parent advocates, individual classroom teachers and school leaders, with or without the support of policies provided at a jurisdictional level. For the first time, we are seeing serious evidence of policy-level support in Victoria (and this is also occurring in other state sectors and also in many Catholic education diocesan systems in Australia) for high-quality, evidence-based reading instruction, aligned more broadly, with the evolving body of evidence known as the science of learning. This means that change is now also coming from the canopy level of the education forest.

But where are our education academics – the inhabitants of the overstory, in this history-making tipping point? Education academics are the metaphorical “huge trees” that “live in a different climate”. They have “adapted to take advantage of the wind for seed dispersal and typically the seeds of these species are light and equipped with some sort of mechanism to allow the winds to carry the seeds great distances away from the parent tree”. Those in the education overstory are in many cases living very different realities from those on the forest floor, of whom they have at best, an oblique line of sight. With only a small number of exceptions in Australia (and I will single out my own university, La Trobe, here as I am familiar with the direction of travel and progress made) schools and faculties of education have a broad liberal education/sociological orientation that regards science of learning discourse as a form of “neoliberalism” - a vague and ill-defined trope that is meant to immediately signal something terrible for students and teachers in equal measure. By clinging on to the 1970s zeitgeist of student-led, discovery learning, and ignoring the longstanding weight of evidence that it does not level the social justice playing field for students who start from behind, such academics continue to breathe different air from that which must be inhaled and survived in the lower levels of the forest. Push-back against recommendations of the 2023 Teacher Education Expert Panel Review Report also reflect this overstory distance from the real-world reality in the shrub layer and on the forest floor, particularly with arguments made for greater rather than reduced teacher autonomy, the perils of which I have blogged about previously. Members of professions which are held in high esteem in our community do not, as some erroneously imagine, enjoy high levels of autonomy. Instead, they operate within highly constrained accountability parameters and are called out, often quite publicly, when there is even only a suspected dereliction of this duty towards their stakeholders.

So, in addition to finding Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point an enjoyable and informative read, I found it valuable for the notion of the overstory, and how this can inform our thinking at this critical time in education history. Gladwell notes (p. 52)

“The overstory is made up of things way up in the air, in many cases outside our awareness. We tend to forget about the overstory because we’re so focused on the life going on in front of and around us. But overstories turn out to be really, really powerful”.

Education academics cannot afford to maintain this overstory distance from the everyday demands and opportunities of school classrooms. If the tipping point which seems to have been reached in the last year is to be maintained and turned into a sustainable force for good for all students, regardless of their location and any other factors that might work against education success, then these tall trees will need to bend their branches into the understory and see how different the micro-climate is there. Those in the shrub layer and on the forest floor need to be strengthened by the efforts of those who enjoy the lofty heights and views of the overstory. 

Pamela Snow (2024)