2025 minus 2005 equals 20 years of lost progress

 

Image source: MS PowerPoint

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:

Image source

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)