If you’re not too young to do so, cast your mind back to 2005.
What were you doing? Where were you living?
In 2005, my family and I had been living in Bendigo for four years and I had spent the previous seven years cutting my teeth on some serious new (for me) knowledge in the field of public health. This knowledge was pivotal in forcing me to think about language and literacy at a population level, not just at the level of individuals and their assessment profiles. I wasn’t the only one doing so. More on that in a moment.
First up, perhaps you remember some of these 2005 world events?
· Hurricane Katrina
· The launch of YouTube
· The then Prince Charles marrying Camilla Parker Bowles
· The maiden flight of Boeing’s Airbus A380
· The legalisation of same-sex marriage in Canada
….to name a few. It feels like 2005 was a long time ago, doesn't it? That’s because it was.
2025 marks two decades since a near-miss significant event in the life of Australian children: the publication of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (NITL). Readers of The Snow Report are likely to be familiar with the fact that this publication appeared five years after the report of the US National Reading Panel and one year before the publication of the so-called Rose Report in England. The defining feature of these three documents, at the dawn of a new millennium, was that they drew on available scientific evidence to synthesise recommendations for policy-makers, school leaders, and classroom teachers on how to most effectively teach children to read - at scale. The NITL also drew on extensive school-based consultations and input from a reference group comprising stakeholders from 24 peak bodies with expertise in, or relevant to education. So far, so good.
Language and terminology varied slightly between these reports, but they all recommended that children in English-speaking jurisdictions be exposed to instruction that is delivered by knowledgeable teachers, in a structured and explicit way, building from code knowledge to the ability to process and derive meaning from increasingly complex unfamiliar text.
The NITL report stated that:
"Findings from the research evidence indicate that all students learn best when teachers adopt an integrated approach to reading that explicitly teaches phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary knowledge, and comprehension."
Note that the report did recommend integration of these essential elements, but it did not recommend something called “balanced literacy” (BL) as the means of doing so; selective quote-mining by BL devotees in the years since has sometimes been allowed to create this impression, but it is a falsehood.
The 20 recommendations arising from this report were largely met with a deafening silence in Australian education jurisdictions – or perhaps more accurately, with a collective “la la la, we can’t hear you”. The report probably didn’t even find its way into many university libraries and I’m pretty sure it did not grace the lecture theatres or tutorial rooms attended by pre-service teachers, whose lecturers patiently waited for the evidence bad weather event to pass.
The 2005 NITL report was commissioned by the Hon Dr. Brendan Nelson, then Minister for Education, Science, and Training, and following its release, he expressed concerns about the effectiveness of mainstream classroom teaching methods in literacy education. He further emphasised the importance of early identification and intervention for students with learning difficulties, highlighting the need for teachers to be equipped with the necessary skills to recognise and address these challenges effectively.
Imagine for a moment, that around this time, there was a national report signposting ways to reduce rates of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS, formerly known as “cot death”) and that the recommendations of this report were adopted and translated into changed practice by health professionals in all states and territories.
Well funnily enough, such a report was published by Henderson-Smart et al., in 1998, building on work commenced in the preceding decade, and, as readers will know, its recommendations were adopted, and (drum-roll)…..SIDS rates have dropped dramatically ever since.
If you’ve ever wondered what a dramatic response to an evidence-based shift in public policy looks like, look no further than the graph below:
Of course, the unexpected loss of beautiful, healthy and cherished babies has a tragic and confronting immediacy that lends itself to galvanised and united action and we should rightly celebrate these wins. My own children were born in 1988 and 1989 and like most people at that time, I knew people whose lives had been devastated by SIDS. I am grateful that SIDS has not been a sinister shadow over my daughters’ early parenting years.
Had policy-makers, health professionals and the media placed ideology over evidence, taking a “balanced” approach to supporting “a range of practices”, many healthy young adults born from the 1990s onwards (many of them now classroom teachers no doubt) simply would not be with us today – such is the power of evidence-based policy and practice.
We are fortunate in Australia, to be able to apply evidence in this way, but evidence is not a luxury commodity with peculiar relevance only to fields such as medicine, public health, and engineering. It is also available and relevant to education, but academics and policy-makers in that field have adopted a “buffet” approach to research evidence, selecting familiar sweet, tasty morsels here and there and rejecting offerings that they do not recognise or understand. I don’t recall the nurses’ union making silly and embarrassing public statements that providing evidence-based guidelines to new parents on SIDS prevention would “de-professionalise” maternal and child health nurses and was disrespectful of their autonomy and expertise. Professionals understand that autonomy and accountability go hand-in-hand and if the community is forced to chose one over the other, it will opt for accountability every time.
Where might we have been, two decades on, in 2025, had our education leaders followed the lead of their health counterparts and taken action on behalf of our children after the 2005 NITL report?
- We might have NAPLAN data that is not flat-lining and concealing significant gaps for students in so-called equity and diversity groups.
- We might have teachers who are knowledgeable about how their writing and spelling system works and not having to pay for this in their own time, sometimes after years of frustration and low impact in the classroom.
- We might not have substantial numbers of students entering secondary school with literacy and/or numeracy skills three or more years below those of their peers.
The concerns articulated by the Hon Brendan Nelson back in 2005 have been echoed in countless subsequent reviews, inquiries and reports, most notably in the 2023 Teacher Education Expert Panel Report (for link and my commentary, see here). Let’s remember too, that fewer than one in five children who are behind in Grade 3 catch up and stay on level. As Dr. Anita Archer reminds us, we can't intervene our way out of Tier 1 problems.
It's taken two decades for us to stop spinning the wheels in reading instruction in Australia, but that’s two decades we can’t have back. That’s tens of thousands of children who have spent thirteen years at school in a wealthy, industrialised nation, only to exit semi-literate. If evidence about reducing SIDS had been wilfully withheld from professionals and parents, it would be front-page news. The evidence free-pass for education needs to be retired. I've written previously about the fact that where change is happening, it's typically driven by classroom teachers; education academics need to come down from the upper levels of the forest canopy and listen to these practice experts on the forest floor.
Twenty years on from our NITL Report, many education policy-makers and academics, school leaders, and (I would argue, to a lesser extent) classroom teachers are still indulging the buffet approach to evidence. This is evidenced by school leaders asking their staff questions like "What's the bare minimum we need to do to comply with the phonics mandate?". They are urged to reflect on evidence wins in other fields and ask how their own humility can contribute to better lives for the children they serve. Children’s instructional time is not ours to waste.
I hope that commentators in another 20 years’ time will be reporting on transformed respect for evidence, meaningful knowledge translation, and most importantly, dramatic data shifts that show that we value children’s futures as much as their lives.
© Pamela Snow (2025)
There is some evidence of how things would have turned out had Australia implemented the recommendations of the NITL report in 2005. England implemented the recommendations of the NRP in 2007. The bottom line: There is not much evidence that England is doing better than Australia or other English speaking countries. Indeed, England came last of English speaking countries in the most recent PISA results.
ReplyDeleteWe've had this discussion many times Jeff. Complex outputs have complex inputs. England adopted the recommendations of its national reading inquiry and is outperforming Australia and many other OECD nations on PIRLS, which is a more proximal measure in this discussion than PISA. England is also making gains on closing attainment gaps, which we are not in Australia.
DeleteYes, we keep having this discussion because you keep claiming that requiring more/better phonics in schools should improve reading outcomes. But I just don’t see the evidence. I’m not sure why PIRLS is better than PISA, but let’s just look at the PIRLS results over time in England:
Delete2001: 553
2006: 539
2011: 552
2016: 559
2021: 558
It is also hard to take these findings as evidence that the legal requirement of phonics in England in 2006 has improved reading outcomes. Perhaps you are advocating a different type of instruction in Australia than in England, and would be interested in knowing what that is, and why you think it would lead to better outcomes.
Jeff (Bowers) it might be good if you go back and re-read this post, and perhaps also the NITL report too, as the arguments in both extend well beyond "phonics" (a word that appears twice in a 1400-word post), to take in
Delete- higher teacher knowledge,
- more explicit teaching across all components of the reading process, and
- better progress monitoring and early action
......all in order to disrupt data flat-lining and halt rising equity gaps.
Perhaps you could share here your scalable recommendations for Australian policy makers about how to address these challenges, given our actions in the last 20 years have not done so.
I recommend "Must Phonics Fail in Order for Structured Word Inquiry to Succeed? (https://learningbydesign.com/professional-development/spell-links-blogue/)
Delete"I take as my thesis the third of Reid Lyon’s 10 maxims about how children learn to read: 'All good readers are good decoders. Decoding should be taught until children can accurately and independently read new words . . . Decoding is the on-ramp for word recognition.'
I have not seen a more efficient or effective way to teach decoding than through phonics—through systematic and explicit exposure to grapheme-phoneme correspondences that are used for encoding and decoding. Both efficiency and effectiveness, as well as simplicity, really matter because they impact how successfully we can teach all the literacy components students need in order to become proficient readers."
The word phonics may only appear twice in your post, but the emphasis on more explicit phonics is central to these documents: "The defining feature of these three documents, at the dawn of a new millennium, was that they drew on available scientific evidence to synthesise recommendations for policy-makers, school leaders, and classroom teachers on how to most effectively teach children to read - at scale". If your proposal is very different than what has been implemented in England (that includes more than phonics), then the outcomes may well be different. But if the goal is to implement something similar to the English curriculum in Australia, then I don't see why we should expect very different outcomes. My main objection is when researchers claim that the evidence for more phonics is strong, and point to almost 20 years of mandated phonics in England as evidence. If you agree the evidence in England is mixed at best, then great.
DeletePerhaps you could share here your scalable recommendations for Australian policy makers about how to address these challenges, given our actions in the last 20 years have not done so.
DeleteThank you Harriett, for sharing that most comprehensive and well-argued post. You nailed it with your dog cartoon reference in the opening: "It’s not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail"
DeleteI'm re-sharing it here so others can easily access it too:
Must Phonics Fail in Order for Structured Word Inquiry to Succeed?
Harriett Janetos, January, 2025.
https://learningbydesign.com/professional-development/spell-links-blogue/
I'm just letting your followers know that there is little evidence that reading outcomes in England have improved in response to requiring systematic phonics and a phonics screening check. That is relevant information when deciding what to do in Australia.
DeletePerhaps you could share here your scalable recommendations for Australian policy makers about how to address these challenges, given our actions in the last 20 years have not done so.
DeleteI do not understand why you keep asking me this question when I point out the reading outcome in England following the implementation of the recommendations of the Rose Report. Even if I had no ideas about better possible approaches, it is still important to characterise the data. And it is particularly important to accurately characterise the outcomes in England if you are trying to develop a similar curriculum in Australia. Can we agree on this? I don't see why this is controversial a position. Annoying sure, as I keep pointing this out. If you think I'm mischaracterising the evidence then I would like to hear why, but challenging me to provide a better method is a non sequitur.
DeleteI do think SWI is a promising approach, but I would agree that it is not ready to deliver at scale (more tools and training would be needed for that), and more study is required. Unfortunately, the commitment to phonics makes it difficult to get funding for alternative approaches like SWI.
With regard to Harriett's point, I don't think phonics has to fail before SWI can succeed (SWI might turn out to be better even if the curriculum in England was improving reading outcomes). But these issues should be discussed in the context of an accurate understanding of what has been found so far.
From "The Vanishing Act in The Balancing Act: Reading Instruction That Ignores Orthographic Mapping and Cognitive Load Theory Is a Setback for Students" (https://highfiveliteracy.com/2024/08/28/the-vanishing-act-in-the-balancing-act/):
Delete"When a pendulum swings in education, how do we track its collateral damage? If what lies in disarray under its arc is a practice informed by research, this is concerning. When systematic and explicit phonics instruction decontextualized from literature is blamed for failing to improve comprehension, do we toss out those instructional practices—or do we make sure we have equally robust comprehension-building lessons? And if we do keep those foundational skills activities, does that mean we cease to examine their efficacy? Or do we continue to monitor student progress and evaluate our instruction in light of that progress?
. . . Regardless, it is important to emphasize that while the strength of this evidence for decontextualized phonics instruction may rest on improvement related to reading and spelling rather than comprehension, these are not insignificant outcomes and should not be ignored. Boosting comprehension can be accomplished by addressing the upper strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope as Linnea Ehri explains in the National Reading Panel Report:
At the end of training, test results showed that Jolly Phonics children were able to read significantly more words and pseudowords and write more words than Big Book children. The overall effect size was d = 0.73. In a follow-up test one year later, the phonics group outperformed the control group in reading and spelling words but not in reading comprehension. This may have occurred because most of the students were ELL. For their comprehension to be improved, perhaps more extensive instruction to enhance competency in English syntax and semantics is required (ch. 2, p. 132)."
This feels a bit like gaslighting. Those of us who are "committed" to phonics instruction use it because we see the results, how it is--right now--what we have to effectively and efficiently teach kids how to read. It would be malpractice to abandon this approach until there was evidence to the contrary. Robert Pondiscio reminds us that "you have to make the job doable by the teachers we have--not the ones we wish we had," which is also the point Danielle Colenbrander makes about her study using Structured Word Inquiry:
Delete"In a recent appearance on two podcasts (The Literacy View and Teaching Literacy Podcast) to discuss her meta-analysis of the effects of morphological instruction, Danielle Colenbrander explains the importance of simplicity during beginning reading instruction: 'You can’t teach everything, and there’s always going to be a compromise.' In the Teaching Literacy Podcast, she refers to the 'steep learning curve' the SWI approach requires and how time-consuming it is. On The Literacy View, she elaborates on this point.
'I was in 12-13 schools, trying to help teaching assistants roll out Structured Word Inquiry . . . I was in the schools very frequently with the teachers trying to help them do this, and I saw how difficult it is to deliver this kind of instruction because you need a really deep, deep knowledge of morphology and etymology . . . English morphology and etymology–sometimes it’s useful. Some of it is, you know, predictable, but some of it is quite obscure, and you don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time looking at that . . . That is my concern with something that is very open-ended and doesn’t have a strict scope and sequence . . . I really think very pragmatically about what’s going to be most useful and what’s kind of manageable for a really busy teacher.'"
In your experience phonics is working, great, but in the meta-analyses on phonics, and in the English outcomes on international tests (PIRLS and PISA) an national tests (SATs) the benefits are not at all clear. This is not gaslighting, this is a summary of the empirical evidence. There are lots of people working with SWI who find it is working much better than phonics, but I don't think you would accept this as a basis of requiring SWI (and fair enough).
DeleteAnd in any case, my point here is not about SWI or any alternative approach, I'm just pointing out the evidence regarding phonics. If I'm wrong on the evidence, I should be called out regarding the evidence. Challenging me to provide an alternative approach, or criticising SWI, is not addressing the empirical evidence regarding phonics. Here is a good discussion on a podcast that I had nothing to do with that does a nice job summarising the problems with the evidence: https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-18-phonics-and-the-reading
Thanks for the link. I listened to that episode when it first came out. It is clear that decoding/word recognition is necessary but not sufficient in order to become a proficient reader. We can agree on that evidence. But we can't just dismantle the most efficient and effective method to teach decoding that we currently have because we haven't seen growth in comprehension. We need to teach ALL the strands in Scarborough''s Rope efficiently and effectively, Your time is better spent getting us to teach morphology effectively once students are efficient decoders. Or--come up with a more efficient means of teaching decoding.
DeleteFrom David Share's new article: Share, D. (2025). Blueprint for a universal theory of learning to read: The Combinatorial Model. (Under Review). Academia. https://www.academia.edu/118772944/Blueprint_for_a_universal_theory_of_learning_to_read_The_Combinatorial_Model
DeleteUsing the metaphor of the maturing tree, Share provides the following concrete example of what many of us who have worked with kindergartners and first graders recognize as the beginning reading instruction recommended in our phonics programs. He writes:
"Beginning readers of English are often (and wisely) first taught an oversimplified deterministic “rule” that the letter a (as in cat) makes the sound / æ/. Consider this as the first shoot at the single-letter layer or branch. This bit of information is not discarded as the reader grows, but is gradually refined into a more nuanced context-conditioned probabilistic (primarily implicit) understanding that this correspondence works well as a general default decoding (especially in short monosyllabic words such as cat, bag, and stand), but has other sounds in more complex words depending on position and context (take, call care, wand, farm, team, play, boat, etc.).
As print experience accumulates and decoding becomes more efficient, a growing (and interconnected/arborized) orthographic lexicon (or “sight vocabulary”) provides the resources for an expanding influence of word-level morphological and lexical factors . . . For example, English-speaking readers in the second and third grades read suffixed words such as hilly faster than matched pseudosuffixed words such as silly. It is widely agreed that this occurs only after the “basics” of decoding at the level of single letters and (sub-morphemic) combinations of letters such as digraphs have been mastered (as outlined in the previous section). However, sensitivity to some super-high frequency morphemes such as the English plural -s suffix and the past tense -ed which each have multiple phoneme values depending on the previous morpheme is surely acquired near the outset of reading."
And this in “A Commentary on Bowers (2020) and the Role of Phonics Instruction in Reading” (2021) where Fletcher, Savage and Vaughn note the following:
Delete"When Bowers suggests in the concluding paragraph of his review that the effects of systematic phonics instruction versus alternative reading methods including whole language are a “draw,” we think this conclusion is tantamount to acceptance of the null hypothesis and is not helpful to educators or their students. Not only is this statement not supported by the evidence from which Bowers claims to derive his judgements, it unnecessarily arouses controversy in a field that needs to focus on the best practices available . . . The appropriate question to ask of a 21st science of teaching is not the superiority of phonics versus alternative reading methods, including whole language and balanced literacy, but how best to combine different components of evidence-based reading instruction into an integrated and customized approach that addresses the learning needs of each child."
As an educator, I appreciate any attempts to help both me and my students during daily instruction. And I am certainly concerned that undermining phonics instruction has “aroused unnecessary controversy,” a distraction we can ill afford because of its diversion from best practices.
Well, Pam, if your misery is seeking company, I can tell you that just today I sent my school board members an email chronicling my relationship with the district over the last 25 years, first as a parent and then as a reading specialist. We must be painting by the same numbers because your picture matches mine, a group portrait of all the children left behind. Someone needs to say it--thank you for doing so.
ReplyDeleteThanks Harriett - it's disheartening that we can't take our collective feet off the throttle just yet. Keep up your outstanding work in your district!
Delete20 years ago when this report was released, I was excited because my son was starting kindergarten. I thought the literacy crisis in this country had been solved and he would get the best reading instruction. That was not to be. My son is a living, breathing and suffering example of the educational negligence that has occurred in the last two decades. The saddest thing is that I am a teacher and I should’ve been able to teach him to read, but I soon realised that my own initial teaching degree had let me down too. Years of retraining myself at my own expense, eventually saw him learn to read, but the scars and the trauma from his beginning school experience run deep. Unfortunately in my advocacy work with struggling readers I see the trauma time and time again that remains in adults, even those that have managed to hide their pain and gain employment. This cannot be allowed to continue any longer.
ReplyDeleteThank you Pam for being a clear voice of reason and for your tireless efforts in this space.
Thank you for taking the time to describe what this space has looked like for you, as both a parent and a teacher - a very particular (and sharp) lens.The pain and anguish arising from your experience is made worse by the fact that it was entirely avoidable. We have to do better.
DeleteAs a middle leader trying to drive change to align reading and teaching practises to the science - I can agree - it is beyond exhausting. I am often left wondering why my system (public education) is letting me down. Why are we all pushing up hill when a team of people smarter than me could create a system where reading materials and assessments come from the top. Until the system starts to listen to these big reports and the little working ants (us classroom teachers) keep doing all the hard work no real traction in outcomes for the population will occur.
ReplyDeleteI hear and feel your pain and frustration. In fact, had it not been for classroom teachers, I doubt there would have been any progress at all in the last 20 years, but where we have seen shifts, they've largely come (in my estimation) from classroom teachers advocating and "managing up" in their schools. I wrote about this in a post in late 2024: http://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2024/12/education-tipping-points-and.html
DeletePlease don't give up though - it's foot-soldiers such as your good self who have contributed to the groundswell that is becoming increasingly difficult for policy makers to ignore. Universities will be the last frontier I suspect.
Thanks, Pam—this is a powerful blog post. I’d also add that parent advocacy groups are not just leading the way; they’re fighting every step of the way. In Victoria, the new Government EOI/Phonics Check coming in June is a direct result of relentless parent advocacy, backed by like-minded organisations, and driven by the need to fix a broken system.
ReplyDeleteParents are going back to school themselves—learning what should have been taught in classrooms—just to give their children the education they deserve. Many are sacrificing their careers, financial security, and wellbeing to fill the gaps left by a system that refuses to implement evidence-based education. This cannot continue. The mental health toll on parents is enormous, but the impact on their children—the very ones this system is meant to serve—is even greater. We cannot afford another generation of lost potential. Parents are still here, still fighting, and we won’t stop until real change happens.
You are absolutely correct and parent advocacy groups were the first ones I saluted when I wrote this post in late 2024, celebrating a significant breakthrough in the Victorian government's approach to reading instruction - see http://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2024/12/education-tipping-points-and.html
DeleteWhen we consider the flatlining data showing a decline in our children’s literacy, we are still not even seeing the true statistics of our failing system. Consider the children who are fortunate enough to have access to out of school tuition. My daughter had 3 years of weekly out of school tuition from year 3-6. She is still behind in her literacy, but has gained years of improved understanding from explicit targeted phonics learning. Her NAPLAN results for example don’t reflect the learning she gained from her schooling alone, they show the combined success of school and out of school support- yet no data has been collected to reflect this. My thoughts are that in fact our literacy crisis due to ineffective teaching in our schools is even worse than what the data shows.
ReplyDeleteThese are very valid points. In my state (Victoria), NAPLAN data has been relatively strong, for a range of reasons (largely demographic I suspect). We have no accurate handles on what proportion of students are accessing tutoring and what this contributes to NAPLAN data. We do know, though, that schools in disadvantaged communities can and do work against postcode inertia, by providing high quality instruction - see for example, Churchill Primary: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/results-came-really-quickly-how-one-tiny-victorian-school-turned-literacy-around-20220215-p59wi0.html
DeleteThanks, Pam. Your advocacy is outstanding.
ReplyDelete