The Reading Instruction Policy Rope: A One-Pager

The Reading Instruction Policy Rope (Pamela Snow; 2025) 

 As 2025 draws to a close, I thought it might be helpful to put into one place, a compilation of ideas arising from queries I’ve responded to throughout the year from policymakers, school and literacy leaders, and classroom teachers.

With the help of ChatGPT*, I’ve borrowed from Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope analogy to produce The Reading Instruction Policy Rope above. 
*Image only; the accompanying text is mine.

In the table below, I’ll summarise some key points, in the hope that this can genuinely work as a one-page discussion document and conversation starter. Links and further readings can be found in earlier blogposts on this site.

Input	What this means
Highly knowledgeable teachers on exit from Initial Teacher Education programs - learning and behaviour/wellbeing	Universities need to respect the testable evidence (different from opinions and preferences) on how children learn biologically secondary knowledge and skills, including reading and writing, and the focusing of attention and ability to self-regulate.  The continued privileging of some version of problem / student / discovery-led pedagogy means universities risk being the unicorns left on the shore, while everyone else is on the boat. Unicorns may have been the “loveliest of all” (according to the 1960s Irish Rovers song), but we need less lovely and more academic rigour.
Discerning professional learning practices, aligning with robust, evolving evidence	Teachers are mandated to spend a specified number of hours on professional learning (PL) each year. This is expensive and, in some cases, disruptive to school scheduling.  To be a good use of resources (time, money and mental effort), PL should be selected carefully and scrutinised for alignment with the school’s pedagogical position. It should result in ongoing teacher learning and refinement of practice. Coaching is likely to be a valuable added investment.
Sector and school leaders equipped with strong theoretical foundations on learning and behaviour/wellbeing	Change is most likely to happen when everyone is in the boat, rowing in the same direction. Teaching and learning is everyone’s business, including that of school leaders. It is not something to be delegated in set-and-forget mode and “ticked off” in annual compliance checks. Practice-based evidence tells us that schools that are seeing academic gains are also seeing uplifts in student wellbeing. Leaders need to pay attention to this evidence.
Privileging of leadership, teamwork, communication and change management skills across all seniority levels	Managing change is difficult. People will be invested in current practice, for a range of reasons, and this needs to be approached with empathy, sensitivity, respect, curiosity and purpose.  All stakeholders can improve their listening skills and become better at sharing their views in constructive ways.  Everyone's true north must be student outcomes.
Practice guidelines that support adoption AND de-implementation of teaching and intervention practices	Improved practice is not simply a matter of adding new approaches. It also entails de-implementation of non-aligned methods that are sometimes rusted on to the extent that they are second nature and not even recognised as dispensable.  Asking teachers to adopt new practices without ongoing auditing and refinement is a recipe for teacher overload, burnout and change fatigue. This in turn produces high teacher turn-over, often in the first five years of practice. Scientific evidence is self-correcting over time, so practice guidelines should be living documents.

Have I overlooked anything? If so please let me know, and I’ll consider adding extra input strands and/or extra outcomes (the former dependent on ChatGPT’s willingness to update the image).

© Pamela Snow (2025)

If NAPLAN was football, we’d cheer the goals

 

Image source: MS PPT

This week, 2025 school National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data was made publicly available via the My School website. In an increasingly data-savvy education sector, school leaders, teachers, policy-makers, academics and other stakeholders have accessed media good-news stories of school and sector improvements, though with varying levels of enthusiasm.

NAPLAN has long been controversial, with teacher unions and many education academics opposed to it, often for reasons that don’t stand up to close scrutiny.

Terms like “high-stakes” and “neoliberal accountability mechanism” are commonly thrown into these discussions, typically with no substantiation and (ironically) without a critical stance on their use. It’s also common for strawman arguments to get an outing when NAPLAN is discussed, e.g., “It’s not diagnostic” (it was never intended to be). Others argue that it is stressful for students, which flies in the face of the fact that schools have always assessed student progress (albeit with varying levels of validity and reliability) and the people who set the tone for assessment contexts are the teachers in the room. There is also an in-built assumption here that it is inherently harmful for students to experience and deal with stress – something that schools are well-positioned to scaffold across the curriculum and across year and ability levels.

While it is human nature to rationalise and displace misgivings that are socially awkward to acknowledge, that doesn't mean the community needs to accept such fig-leaves. As those familiar with my work will know, I am a champion of teachers and their efforts to “know better and do better” in their classrooms, often in spite of the preparation they received in their initial teacher education programs.  

Let’s return to first principles and remind ourselves what NAPLAN is and is not, notwithstanding recent changes in the timing of administration and a shift to an adaptive digital platform that was not without some challenges. 

NAPLAN is:

1.      A population-level data-monitoring tool, designed to track progress of individual students, schools, and systems, with respect to literacy and numeracy instruction. This takes place in Years 3, 5, 7, and 9.

2.      A minimum standards check.

3.      A form of feedback on instruction.

4.      Designed to allow schools, systems and jurisdictions to compare apples with apples, controlling for level of community advantage via the  Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) value.

5.      A means of tracking the progress of equity and diversity groups who are over-represented in lower bands.

6.      At least partially a reflection of the instruction students are exposed to – the main variable in students’ lives that schools can actually modify.

NAPLAN is not

1.      Diagnostic.

2.      Designed to tailor instruction for individual students.

3.      High-stakes for individual students (unless the adults make it so).

4.      A measure of creativity, collaboration, or any other so-called “21^st century skills”.

5.      A single measure of the quality of a school or its suitability for a particular child.

In the last five years in particular, Australia has made some genuine policy gains with respect to literacy instruction and numeracy is (finally) starting to catch up. More and more sectors and schools are “on the bus” with respect to evidence-based (explicit) instruction, and their NAPLAN data finally breaks through to reflect the sustained and focused efforts of large numbers of people. It’s not uncommon for growth to be evident to teachers and parents before it reaches the threshold of changing the numbers and colours in NAPLAN data. And when it does, it is validating and affirming, in the same way that when our champion sportspeople display focus and sustained hard work (often out of everyone else’s sight until they “come from nowhere”) to produce wins, trophies and premierships for their teams.

NAPLAN data reports on individuals and teams simultaneously – parents receive data about their individual child, and schools and systems are looking at data derived from the work of teaching and support teams. Increasingly, as with sport, schools are engaging coaches to support the work of their teachers and upskill them "on the field". 

Where once the media were criticised by teacher unions and professional bodies, as well as by education academics for publishing “doom and gloom” stories about NAPLAN results, now they are under fire for publishing stories about schools that have shown significant improvement, often against the odds, given their ICSEA and all that this entails – see here and here.

While I don’t encourage the compilation of so-called “league tables” we should not be surprised that they are created and nor should we insult parents by implying that they are so naïve that decisions about their child’s schooling would be based solely on such a table in a newspaper. By the same token, parents who ignore NAPLAN data are well-advised to consider the costs (financial and emotional) associated with years of tutoring and other forms of support for their struggling offspring.

We’re a nation that thrives on competition and aspiration in sport, but these are apparently unpalatable in fields of endeavour that might create better futures for our children and lead to us becoming a genuinely “clever country”.

We are indeed, as John O’Grady (aka Nino Culotta) famously observed in 1957, a weird mob.

 

© Pamlea Snow (2025)