Once again, in the last week, I’ve been interstate providing professional learning to mixed audiences of teachers and allied health professionals. Being “on the ground” with practitioners in this way is a great opportunity for conversations about the challenges facing schools in different states/territories and in different jurisdictions. In Australia, “jurisdictions” predominantly refers to the state/territory-based government departments of education and the diocesan-based Catholic sector. Then there’s the independent, or “private” sector, which encompasses everything from wealthy, so-called “elite” schools to small community-based schools, some of which run on the smell of the proverbial oily rag. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the breakdown across sectors is roughly 65% in government schools, 19% in Catholic schools, and 16% in independent schools.
In the Catholic system, there’s no fewer than 21 education dioceses across the country. It is difficult to accurately gauge the number of independent schools, as these are sometimes counted with Catholic schools, but we do know that in Australia in 2023, we have approximately 4,042,512 students enrolled in 9,614 schools. (North American readers might be surprised by what seem like low numbers, so it should be borne in mind that the total population of Australia, at the time of writing is 25.7 million).
This introduces scope for enormous background variation in what happens in schools. In Australia, we have 8 states and territories, so in practice, this means 8 different sets of policy settings and guidelines on reading instruction, 8 different approaches to school resourcing, 8 different approaches to professional learning, 8 different approaches to supporting struggling students…..all before we begin to factor in what 21 Catholic education dioceses means for policy variation, and the room for individual variation across private schools. Consider too, that in some government sectors (e.g., Victoria) responsibility for reading instruction is (theoretically at least) devolved to individual schools. So, the possibilities for variation within and between schools are seemingly endless.
The problem here is that there cannot be 9,614 different versions of best practice. “Best practice” by definition implies a hierarchy, i.e., that some approaches are better bets than others. The hierarchy should change over time, as evidence changes, but there is going to be a hierarchy, because of findings derived from scientific research and its application in classrooms. By “scientific” here I am referring to the extent of the rigour, not the discipline or the research paradigm. Researchers from a large number of disciplines study reading (education, sociology, psychology, linguistics, speech pathology, neuroscience, and public policy) and they do so by employing a wide variety of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodologies.
Against this complex backdrop, it can be tempting, when discussing school transformation with respect to reading, to see this as a process that is driven by key individuals in schools, because in practical terms, that is often the case. Let’s not forget, however, to lift our eyes from the immediate dashboard, up to the horizon, and ask ourselves what role policy makers have in guiding, influencing, and in some cases, mandating practice.
Policy is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as:
“A set of ideas or a plan of what to do in particular situations that has been agreed to officially by a group of people, a business organization, a government, or a political party”.
Some of these ideas are going to be better organised, more sharply articulated and prescriptive than others. In the interests of stimulating some reflection among policy makers, I have compiled some self-assessment questions for consideration. Each of these should be responded to on an imaginary sliding 1 – 100-point scale, where the landing point reflects approximate percentage agreement with the propositions below.
I am not suggesting that there are “right” answers here, but policy that doesn't land somewhere lands nowhere, and then anything goes. I am posing these questions for policy makers to ponder because policies are written by people, no matter how de-humanised and impersonal they may appear on web-sites and in downloadable policy documents. So it is people in positions of policy influence who need to consider these questions and determine where they sit on the continuum:
1. How important is it to you that teaching in your sector is closely informed by and aligned to the best possible currently-available research evidence?
2. How important is the combination of low variability and high quality in school reading instruction?
3. If high quality means reducing variability, how prepared are you to mandate practice in schools?
4. To what extent do you believe that policy makers can influence reading instruction in schools?
5. To what extent to do you believe that student data reflects classroom instruction?
6. To what extent do your policy settings endorse / apply / require Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) as a conceptual framework for curriculum design, student monitoring, and intervention?
7. To what extent is teacher autonomy in selecting instructional approaches a core value in your sector?
8. How constrained are you by likely push-back against change to reading instruction in schools? (e.g., from unions, school leaders, classroom teachers, professional bodies).
9. To what extent do your policy settings rely on additional funding (e.g. from the Commonwealth government) as the driver of school change?
I do not want to be prescriptive here about what policy makers “should” think, but I do believe that policy makers should think about each of these dimensions and should identify tensions and inconsistencies in their positions. These tensions and inconsistencies can be the conceptual tangles that create downstream blockages and impede the work of highly capable and motivated players in school leadership and in classrooms. Such blockages impose the greatest educational barriers on our most disadvantaged students.
Reading instruction policy should not be an esoteric set of abstract ideas that allow a thousand flowers to bloom, without disrupting anyone’s equilibrium. Rather, reading instruction policy should be aligned with the greatest weight of evidence (not the loudest ideology), so that it provides a clear blueprint for education practitioners and is highly accountable to education end-users: students, teachers, and parents.
(C) Pamela Snow 2023
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