This is in part, a blog-post I have been meaning to prepare for a few weeks but have been delayed by the commencement of some long-service leave and overseas travel – so it is finally being pulled together in Riga, the capital of Latvia. My husband and I are travelling with a small group, learning much geopolitical history and enjoying local culture, architecture and cuisine in the process.
I have, however, found myself distracted and saddened, though not overly surprised by the recent education train-wreck in the UK that culminated in the tragic death of Jason Arday a former Professor of Sociology at Cambridge University, who was born in the mid 1980s in the UK to Ghanaian parents. At the time of writing, indications are that Arday took his own life. This is the point where commentators bifurcate: was this catastrophe the result of a relentless, unfair, race-based pile-on, or was it of education’s own making, after an early-career academic with question-marks over aspects of his CV was elevated and deified before undergoing reasonable scrutiny that illuminated significant concerns from which academic recovery was unlikely?
Dichotomies are not necessarily helpful in these scenarios, so let’s place these two positions on a continuum. It perhaps won’t surprise readers of this blog that I lean more to the latter end of the spectrum on a tragic predicament that could almost certainly have been prevented.
But first, some context. I write with the license of personal experience on suicide loss, having lost my brother this way just two years ago. I know how shattering this has been for me and my extended family and so have some sense of the pain, anger, and numbness Arday’s loved ones are currently grappling with. I can only wish them small increments of strength in the long road ahead.
I have read many opinion pieces in recent days about what will no doubt become known as “The Arday Affair”. Out of respect for Arday and his family, I will not add my own here, but do recommend the perspectives of
· Professor Alice Sullivan, Professor of Sociology at UCL who has been publicly critical of the low levels of academic rigour in much of the so-called “research” emanating from contemporary education faculties – research that would better be described as advocacy for a pre-determined ideological stances. You can listen to a recent Times Radio interview (entitled If Cambridge Doesn’t Have Rigour It’s Just A Collection Of Old Buildings) with Professor Sullivan here.
· Dr John McWhorter, Associate Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University, and himself a man of colour. Read his essay How academia created Jason Arday.
· Professor Richard Dawkins, Emeritus Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. Read his piece Jason Arday: a question of academic standards What was his obscurantism hiding?
For now, I’ll zoom out to the wider question of sociology’s problematic stronghold on contemporary education, in Australia and other English-speaking nations. Regular readers of The Snow Report will know I have blogged previously on this topic, most recently in June this year, when I published this piece: The dog ate my homework: Education’s evidence-excuses echo-chamber. This struck a chord with many and a raw nerve for some.
I’ll leave you then with the responses I prepared for my contribution to a recent panel discussion at the ALP Fringe Conference in Adelaide. The panel was chaired by Professor Barbousas Pro Vice-Chancellor, Education, Impact and Innovation and Dean of the School of Education at La Trobe University (i.e. my boss). I was joined on this panel by Dr Jordana Hunter, Program Director for Education at the McKinnon Foundation, Josh MacAlister MP (UK Children’s Minster and former teacher), and John Brumby AO, Chancellor of La Trobe University.
The questions posed below were Joanna’s and my responses follow.
Pamela Snow, the evidence is in on reading instruction, so what is stopping us, and what will it take to deliver?
What is stopping us is the heavy hand of history.
When Education in Australia began moving from Colleges of Advanced Education into universities the 1980s, in keeping with the 1980s zeitgeist, it became essentially an extra sociology department on our tertiary campuses.
There’s nothing wrong with sociology. It’s a respected
discipline but it does not inform us about the cognitive processes in learning
biologically unnatural skills such as reading.
Imagine an alien arriving on earth from a
distant galaxy and wanting to research human schooling. She lands her spaceship
on a university campus and asks for directions to the faculty that researches
how children learn. Will she be directed to the Faculty of Education? No. she
will be directed to the Cognitive Psychology Department. If, however, she wants
to learn about reimagining educational equity through intersectional critiques
of neoliberal schooling, ideally through the lens of a twentieth century philosopher
such as Foucault or Bourdieu …. then she will need to find the Faculty
of Education.
Here-in lies the problem. Education academics
are overwhelmingly, real or de facto sociologists and favour a well-intentioned,
“broad church” approach to inquiry, where the principle of multiple ways of
knowing means no one body of evidence is allowed to carry greater weight than
another.
Education academics reject the premise of questions like “What is the best way to teach children to read” because there might be a clear winner and loser in that debate, and that would then necessitate adherence to particular principles in initial teacher education, rather than letting a thousand flowers bloom, with no accountability for downstream outcomes. If you want to start a bushfire, just use the words “science” of learning” in a room full of education academics.
What will it take us to deliver? An external intervention that overrides academic freedom and stares down the economic reliance of universities on education degrees for their budget bottom-lines.
Pamela Snow, you have spent your career watching the evidence on reading instruction be established, contested and re-litigated. Why does settled science keep getting reopened in education when it would not be in medicine, and what does that cost children?
Science is never completely settled, but it is settled-enough on reading instruction for us to take action at scale, using public health prevention principles. However, knowledge translation is blocked by the “but, but, but” rhetoric of (for example) “every child is different”, “there’s still unanswered questions”, “there’s a range of ways of teaching a child to read” etc - so this favours a paralysis and inertia of indecision over drawing decisive lines in the sand, as we see in other disciplines like medicine, with clinical care pathways that create accountability guardrails without removing practitioner judgement, and iterative review as the evidence evolves.
Education academics whose work is embedded in postmodern sociology are focused on rhetorical activism, not on the basic scientific foundation of falsifiability. Findings they don’t like are cast into the moral wilderness with slurs like “positivism” or “neoliberal” - no more discussion needed. This is not academic rigour.
The “your science is different from my science” position is used to shut down debate. This is scarily close to “your faith is different from my faith” position adopted in religious debates.
I don’t think education academics want to be held accountable on privileging one particular way of teaching for a whole range of reasons: it’s easier, when you can just stay with the thing that you like, are comfortable with, and those in your academic community also favour.
Many education academics haven’t studied cognitive science or statistics, so deep down, they may feel ill-equipped to engage with quantitative research and critique it, but it’s perhaps more face-saving just to reject an entire paradigm.
My message to education is “when you stand for nothing, you fall for everything”.
Pamela Snow. Let me put the strongest version of the objection to you. Critics within the profession say this movement narrows teaching to phonics drills and scripted lessons and deskills teachers in the process. What is the best version of that argument, and where does it go wrong?
This really is a straw man argument, and I think its best version is that it’s ill-informed. If you think for example, of Hollis Scarborough’s famous Reading Rope – an elegant visual metaphor created in 2001, that illustrates the many strands that represent skilled reading, what you see in the lower strand is word recognition or decoding – getting the words off the page. You’ll find images of this Reading Rope in explicit teaching classrooms around the country. The far larger part of the rope, the upper strands, is the language comprehension skills that teachers need to be working on once decoding is knocked out of the way – vocab, background knowledge, linguistic inferencing, mastery of syntax and so on.
But students can’t comprehend text they can’t get off the page. No-one in this room can either.
So - an early emphasis on explicit phonics teaching is to launch students onto the decoding onramp that leads to the comprehension freeway. Explicit phonics instruction, delivered by highly knowledgeable teachers, turns the key in the decoding lock to reading early, so that instructional time and children’s mental real estate, is focused on the complex moving parts of the comprehension machinery. This requires more, rather than less knowledge and skills on the part of teachers, as our research at La Trobe has shown.
There’s long been a romantic idea that we can somehow “love children to literacy” via exposure to beautiful children’s literature. When this hasn’t worked, blame is sheeted home to factors like poverty, community disadvantage, poor parental engagement in education and school funding.
When student data is poor, the last rock that education academics want to turn over is the quality of the instruction that students have been exposed to. I think this is an extraordinary insult to the esteem and potential impact of teaching as a profession.
Pamela Snow, teacher preparation sits upstream of everything. What must initial teacher education guarantee that it currently does not, and what should universities be held accountable for?
Well, the very least universities could do is to require that their staff stop teaching pseudoscientific edumyths (“neuroflapdoodle” as someone once said on social media) like learning styles, left-brain-right-brain learners, and the use of coloured lenses to support struggling readers – to name a few. Education students are incurring a HECS debt to be taught ideas that are worse than outdated – they were never evidence-based to start off with. Education academics need to be held accountable for their ideas and their evidence-base. Questioning these should not trigger protests that are on a continuum that feels dangerously poised between ideology and theology.
Initial teacher education needs to guarantee that regardless of which campus of which university a student attends, they will be exposed to consistent, rigorous, empirically supported theory and practice that comes from an evolving and self-correcting body of scientific knowledge. The content of ITE should not be a university marketing show bag.
This is the assurance we give to medical, nursing, psychology, allied health, and engineering students. Academics in those disciplines honour their contracts with the community by being custodians of the scientific method and ensuring that ideas are retired when they need to be superseded by stronger, better-evidenced principles – not just new ideas that represent the latest fads and fashions or new ideological bent.
Universities need to stop hiding behind academic freedom as a fig-leaf over ideological preferences for practices not supported by empirical evidence.
When ITE can guarantee that its graduates are incurring HECS debts for degrees that are theoretically and practically fit for purpose, teaching graduates will possess an exclusive body of knowledge unique to their profession, and can take pride in holding themselves accountable for applying it, regardless of the context of the schools they are working in.
Pamela Snow - your concluding remarks?
Universities need to stop earnestly and busily admiring the problem of teacher initial education and grasp the prickly nettle of aligning it with other vocationally orientated disciplines where the guardrails are in place, and are checked, reviewed and modified as needed over time.
Noble, well-worded good intentions are not enough.
The federal government needs to pull every lever at its disposal (and where necessary, create extra ones) to signal to universities that, to channel Gough Whitlam – “It’s Time”. Time to overhaul teacher pre-service education.
We’re not having these discussions about medicine, nursing, psychology, engineering, and so on – only education. Why? Because education has been the academy’s Peter Pan. The government that sees the TEEP Report recommendations actually implemented, is the government that will re-write history in profound downstream ways.
© Pamela Snow (2026)
