Education tipping points and overstorys: a cautiously optimistic look back at 2024

There’s no such thing as a quiet year in education, but 2024 has been a notably non-quiet year, especially for reading instruction in the state of Victoria, Australia. On June 13, the Victorian Deputy Premier and Minister for Education, the Hon. Ben Carroll MP released a media statement signalling a new direction of travel for Victorian schools with respect to early years reading instruction. 

Specifically, the Department announced that it is mandating the use of 25 minutes of systematic synthetic phonics and phonemic awareness instruction in all Victorian classrooms, Foundation to Year 2, as of Term 1, 2025. I blogged back in June about the sustained advocacy by many, many stakeholders, over a number of years, that led to this historic announcement and again commend the Minister on this momentous and shape-shifting change in Victorian education. It has been refreshing and impressive in equal measure to see the quality of the work undertaken by the Department since the June announcement, culminating in the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0, high-quality lesson plans, discontinuation of the psychometrically weak English Online Interview, in favour of a robust and efficient Phonics Screening Check, and high-quality, accessible information for parents.

The usual colour and movement ensued from some quarters about this announcement. The Victorian Branch of the Australian Education Union immediately went into overdrive about Minister Carroll’s media release reflecting a lack of respect for teacher autonomy, and was critical of what was seen as a lack of consultation. I wonder if doctors and nurses who work in our public hospitals expect to be consulted via their unions on infection control protocols, or whether these are simply matters which policy makers, as consumers of evidence, should distil into knowledge-translation formats that ensure the best outcomes for end-users of the system, in that case, patients. It was disappointing that the education union made no reference to the needs of students. It missed an opportunity to be part of the education tipping point that could, over time, result in significant social justice benefits to all students, but most notably to those in equity groups who are constantly sold short when instruction is not of the highest and tightest possible calibre: students from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds, students from rural and regional areas, those from English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EALD) background, and/or those who have special education needs such as learning difficulties and other forms of neurodiversity that heighten, rather than diminish their need for high-quality instruction. Such students were a focus of the 2024 Grattan Institute Reading Guarantee Report authored by Jordana Hunter, Anika Stobart and Amy Haywood.

Recently, I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s 2024 Revenge of the Tipping Point, a sequel/companion text to his best-seller nearly a quarter of a century ago, The Tipping Point (2000). In the earlier volume, Gladwell referred to “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point” in how large-scale sociological change comes about. He argued that 80% of the work in this large-scale population-level shift is done by 20% of the players, people he categorised as connectors, mavens and persuaders. I didn’t use those actual terms in my June 2024 blogpost about the work that led up to Minister Carroll’s announcement, outside and inside the Ministry, but people familiar with this space will know they are a lens that can easily be laid over the work of the tireless advocates I referred to above.

So, yes, 2024 has seen the culmination of an evolving tipping point in reading instruction in Victoria. This was nowhere more evident than in early December when National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data was made public and primary schools in all sectors and locations, large and small, that had undertaken an instructional journey away from balanced literacy towards explicit and systematic literacy instruction were celebrating the “greening” of their data – relative to like-schools and relative to schools across the nation. If you need examples, look no further than (for starters), Bentleigh West PS, Brandon Park PS, Canadian Lead PS, Chelsea Heights PS, Churchill PS, Dandenong North PS, and Horsham West PS. These results are no accident. Show me a school celebrating similar data shifts as a result of moving away from explicit teaching, towards balanced literacy and its bedfellows: student-led, discovery-learning, and low teacher-knowledge about the science of reading and the science of human learning. If you’re interested in how deeply teachers value acquiring this knowledge, check out this open-access study my colleagues and I published earlier this year on responses to online short courses offered through La Trobe University’s Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab to support teachers wanting to strengthen their reading instruction.

Another manifestation of the education tipping point has been the fact that Ballarat Clarendon College has returned the top Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) results for the third year in a row. This is also no accident and reflects the tipping process that was initiated quietly in that school some ten years ago under the leadership of its former principal, David Shepherd. As I understand it, senior leaders in the school interrogated their own data and the cognitive psychology literature on models of instruction that produce optimal outcomes for all students, regardless of their postcodes and personal or community-level starting points and went hard on applying this to a highly interactive model of explicit instruction in a low-variance way across year-levels and subject areas. It takes ten years to be an overnight success, and here they are: a school in regional Victoria outshining schools with “better” postcodes and much higher fees. To paraphrase an early 1990s US election slogan, it’s the instruction, stupid. There are fixed costs associated with having teachers in classrooms. How they spend their time (which of course, is more ethically thought of as students’ time), is the wild card, and high-variance and high-quality are mutually incompatible, just as they are when we are running hospitals, building bridges, or manufacturing chocolate. Education is not, as some would have us believe, a “special case” when it comes to the imperative to apply high-quality evidence.

Coming back to Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell introduces an interesting new angle in this volume that I had not encountered before – the notion of the overstory. The overstory is the highest layer of foliage in a forest, making up its canopy. According to the World Rain Forests site, the overstory

……consists of giant emergent trees that tower above the surrounding canopy. These trees are huge, at least by tropical standards, some exceeding a height of 213 feet (65 meters) with horizontal limbs that stretch over 100 feet (30 m). These trees live in a different climate from the trees of the canopy. The air is much drier and moderately strong winds blow through their branches. These overstory species have adapted to take advantage of the wind for seed dispersal and typically the seeds of these species are light and equipped with some sort of mechanism to allow the winds to carry the seeds great distances away from the parent tree. 

This got me thinking about this new (to me) concept in relation to education and wondering what the overstory layer might be in the context of education. Let’s consider how this could look in relation to education, by retrofitting the forest layers to different strata of influence in education. I’ve done this in the diagram below:

 Image source

Until recently, I think it’s been fair to say that the bulk of the change processes and resulting tipping points in education have been happening in the shrub and forest floor layers (and to a lesser extent, the understory), reflecting bottom-up energy and focus – the work of sometimes highly organised and articulate parent advocates, individual classroom teachers and school leaders, with or without the support of policies provided at a jurisdictional level. For the first time, we are seeing serious evidence of policy-level support in Victoria (and this is also occurring in other state sectors and also in many Catholic education diocesan systems in Australia) for high-quality, evidence-based reading instruction, aligned more broadly, with the evolving body of evidence known as the science of learning. This means that change is now also coming from the canopy level of the education forest.

But where are our education academics – the inhabitants of the overstory, in this history-making tipping point? Education academics are the metaphorical “huge trees” that “live in a different climate”. They have “adapted to take advantage of the wind for seed dispersal and typically the seeds of these species are light and equipped with some sort of mechanism to allow the winds to carry the seeds great distances away from the parent tree”. Those in the education overstory are in many cases living very different realities from those on the forest floor, of whom they have at best, an oblique line of sight. With only a small number of exceptions in Australia (and I will single out my own university, La Trobe, here as I am familiar with the direction of travel and progress made) schools and faculties of education have a broad liberal education/sociological orientation that regards science of learning discourse as a form of “neoliberalism” - a vague and ill-defined trope that is meant to immediately signal something terrible for students and teachers in equal measure. By clinging on to the 1970s zeitgeist of student-led, discovery learning, and ignoring the longstanding weight of evidence that it does not level the social justice playing field for students who start from behind, such academics continue to breathe different air from that which must be inhaled and survived in the lower levels of the forest. Push-back against recommendations of the 2023 Teacher Education Expert Panel Review Report also reflect this overstory distance from the real-world reality in the shrub layer and on the forest floor, particularly with arguments made for greater rather than reduced teacher autonomy, the perils of which I have blogged about previously. Members of professions which are held in high esteem in our community do not, as some erroneously imagine, enjoy high levels of autonomy. Instead, they operate within highly constrained accountability parameters and are called out, often quite publicly, when there is even only a suspected dereliction of this duty towards their stakeholders.

So, in addition to finding Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point an enjoyable and informative read, I found it valuable for the notion of the overstory, and how this can inform our thinking at this critical time in education history. Gladwell notes (p. 52)

“The overstory is made up of things way up in the air, in many cases outside our awareness. We tend to forget about the overstory because we’re so focused on the life going on in front of and around us. But overstories turn out to be really, really powerful”.

Education academics cannot afford to maintain this overstory distance from the everyday demands and opportunities of school classrooms. If the tipping point which seems to have been reached in the last year is to be maintained and turned into a sustainable force for good for all students, regardless of their location and any other factors that might work against education success, then these tall trees will need to bend their branches into the understory and see how different the micro-climate is there. Those in the shrub layer and on the forest floor need to be strengthened by the efforts of those who enjoy the lofty heights and views of the overstory. 

(C) Pamela Snow (2024)

Guest post: A letter to my son

Photo source: Heidi Gregory

In our work in the La Trobe Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab, my colleague Professor Tanya Serry and I have contact with a number of parent advocates who campaign tirelessly for the ear of government and other policy-makers, in order to achieve system change, and importantly, accountability on how reading is taught to our children. One such advocate is the indefatigable Heidi Gregory, the founder of Dyslexia Victoria Support. In this guest blogpost, Heidi shares a letter to her son that no parent should ever have to write. That this letter was written nearly 20 years after our National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy speaks of major dereliction of duty on the part of policy-makers and other leaders, across systems and jurisdictions.

 *******

My Darling Son,

As I look back over the last decade, my heart swells with the memories of our journey—one filled with love, pain, and relentless determination. There’s something I feel I need to share with you, as it has shaped so much of who I’ve become as your mother and as an advocate.

Recently, I stumbled upon an old book on our shelf, Reading Begins at Home by Butler and Clay, published in 1979. It’s a book I’ve had for years, but in all honesty, I never realised the weight it carried until now. In it, I found this passage:

“We believe that all parents have their children’s future largely in their hands. So much development has already taken place before children enter school that the teacher’s role can be viewed as only supplementary to what has gone before at home.”

Such a simple statement, yet it has shaped the thinking of parents, educators, and even entire education systems for decades. This belief—that parents are responsible for teaching their children to read before school—led me, and so many others, down a painful path. I thought it was my job, and for years I carried the burden of that misconception. But now, with the clarity of hindsight, I see how devastatingly wrong that belief is.

You may not know this, my darling son, but for ten long years, I’ve fought to understand why our education system held onto such outdated, harmful ideas. I’ve come to realise that the belief "It’s the parents' responsibility to teach their child to read" has been passed down through generations, echoed carelessly by commentators, media, and even educators. This dangerous myth has put enormous pressure on untrained, unprepared parents like me while leaving teachers ill-equipped with outdated information. It was never our job alone.

I’m so sorry, my dear. Your school failed you during your foundational years. They left you to struggle through endless Reading Recovery sessions and useless weekly spelling tests when what you really needed was proper instruction in how to decode words and skills in phonemic awareness. Those classes didn’t teach you to read, spell or write like your friends, and it broke my heart to watch you fight through it. We spent thousands of dollars on interventions outside of school, changed schools, and fought for the support you deserved.

This wasn’t just our battle—so many families have lived the same nightmare. I know that you, too, felt the weight of that struggle. I wish I could take it all away. But instead, I promise you this: I will continue to fight.

In fact, that fight led me to establish, Dyslexia Victoria Support, a parent advocacy group that now has over 10,800 members. I couldn’t bear the thought of other families going through what we did. Through our group, we’ve heard story after story of parents made to feel responsible for their children’s reading struggles; all because of deeply ingrained beliefs that never should have been.

I remember crying as I listened to Emily Hanford’s podcast Sold a Story. For the first time, I heard someone speak the truth—Reading Recovery is based on a theory by Dame Marie Clay that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. This theory, and programs like it, left so many children—yourself included—feeling like failures when the truth was that the system had failed them.

My darling, you are not a failure. You never were. It’s the system that failed to teach you to read and spell in the way you needed, and for that, I am so, so sorry. I regret every moment of stress or pressure you endured.

I’ve spent years trying to understand why this happens, and I recently came across a powerful blog by Pamela Snow, Calling time on parent-blame and children’s reading success. Her words struck a deep chord with me. She so clearly articulates how damaging this cycle of parent blame has been. We were told it was our responsibility to teach you to read, and when you struggled, we were left feeling guilty, like it was somehow our fault. But it never should have been. I encourage you to read it if you ever need to understand the weight of this journey we’ve been on.

From the moment I realised you were struggling and not getting the help you needed, I’ve been fighting for you. And I’m not just fighting for you—I’m fighting for all children who deserve a fair chance to learn to read. Recently, I shared our story with politicians during a Legislative Assembly Inquiry into the state of education in Victoria. I’ve spoken to journalists, educators, and anyone who will listen, all in the hope that no other family has to go through what we did.

I know that you’ve felt the weight of this fight, and I want to thank you for your patience, your courage, and your resilience. I am endlessly proud of you, and I will always be here for you—no matter what. Together, we will continue to push for change.

My love, this battle is not over. But I will fight it for you, for your children, and for every child who needs a champion. And I will make sure that when you become a parent, your children—my grandchildren—will have a strong literacy and numeracy foundation. I will not rest until we ensure that all children, no matter their background, have the chance to learn to read well. Until then, this national tragedy will continue.

With all my love,
Mumma

(C) Heidi Gregory & Pamela Snow (2024)

It takes a village: Changing reading instruction in the Education State.

 

                                                                    Image source: PPT stock

This week was an historic one for the state of Victoria, with our Education Minister and Deputy Premier, the Hon Ben Carroll MP announcing a major change in government policy settings pertaining to reading instruction. You can access the Department’s media release Making Best Practice Common Practice in The Education State as well as reading about it via open access links such as this one from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Students at Victorian state schools will all be taught reading using phonics from 2025. The centrepiece of this announcement is that as of 2025, systematic synthetic phonics will be mandated in all classrooms in the first three years of school. This means Victoria is effectively the last Australian state or territory to formally abandon balanced literacy, an approach I have written about previously, here and here, and have described as being “neither fish or fowl” – it is not whole language and nor is it structured, explicit literacy teaching. It is unfortunately whatever the person using the term wants it to be.

Many people and organisations, including Hedi Gregory and Sarah Gole, and their team at Dyslexia Victoria Support, countless individual school leaders, teachers, allied health professionals, and parents, and of course the La Trobe SOLAR Lab team (including our PhD students, Master of Education students, and dedicated tutors), ably supported by the La Trobe Education Dean, Professor Joanna Barbousas have contributed to this outcome. Alison Clarke OAM deserves a special mention in this regard, as she has campaigned for many years via persuasive, “cut-through” blog-posts, as well as making high quality resources available to classroom teachers, parents, and clinicians – often at no charge. Dr Jennifer Buckingham, FRSN CF has provided countless policy briefs to support decision-makers and practitioners, and Jordana Hunter and Amy Haywood from the Grattan Institute contributed their highly influential Reading Guarantee Report earlier in 2024. Dr Jenny Donovan and her team at AERO have been synthesising evidence for policy-makers and practitioners since the establishment of AERO in 2020, and folk like Lyn Stone have been out there treading the boards in schools, tirelessly providing professional learning to teachers, left high and dry by initial teacher education that missed the mark on reading and spelling instruction. Dr Nathaniel Swain's Think Forward Educators has been a grassroots and low-budget source of high-quality professional learning for teachers and school leaders. Several Victorian primary school principals who have been early adopters well ahead of the curve, have been generous in supporting peers in other schools to make changes. Jo Rogers, a retired Victorian primary teacher has written countless opinion pieces for The Age, such as this one as well as making inquiry submissions, such as this one. Let’s not forget too, the Australian children’s authors, who’ve backed this in over the long haul, such as Jackie French and  Sally Rippin.

Many in the mainstream media have also contributed considered and incisive articles and commentary to the public debate in recent years, with names such as Adam Carey at The Age, Rebecca Urban, formerly of The Australian, Louise Milligan at the ABC, Ellen Fanning of Radio National, Dr Norman Swan of Radio National, Lucy Carroll at the Sydney Morning Herald, Robyn Grace at The Age,  Jordan Baker at The Sydney Morning Herald, and Sarah Duggan at Education HQ, coming to mind. A little further afield, but no less influential, was Emily Hanford, and her award-winning Sold a Story podcast. 

These are not exhaustive lists and I apologise to any people or organisations I have unwittingly overlooked.

Less helpful in this debate, has been the Victorian Branch of the Australian Education Union, that released a statement this week denouncing the Minister’s backing of evidence-based reading instruction and claiming a lack of respect for the professional autonomy of teachers. My message to the union, which I tried to post on their Facebook page, but strangely, comments were “restricted”, is this:

Unfortunately, the AEU seems to have a definition of "professionalism" that is at odds with the rest of the community's. Professions which are held in high esteem at community-level are those whose practitioners are mandated to operate within narrow parameters and are held to account (often publicly) when they do not do so - think pilots, medical practitioners, nurses, psychologists, engineers, etc. They do not get to "choose their own adventure" in the way that schools and teachers have been able to with respect to selecting from a buffet of approaches on reading instruction.

The Education Minister's decision will result in reduced workloads and improved professional satisfaction for teachers - two key outcomes that unions are normally invested in. This has already been demonstrated in schools that have adopted this teaching model, without any additional resourcing. The Education Minister took advice from a number of teachers and school leaders, including attending an event on a Saturday, attended by some 360 passionate and committed teachers from across the State, and fielding spontaneous questions from the audience - without exception demanding greater rigour and a requirement from government that reading be taught explicitly and systematically in every school, not just those who happen to choose to do so.

The Union has a fantastic opportunity here to be on the right side of history and be part of a major overhaul in which everyone can be a winner: students, teachers, parents, and the community at large. In all likelihood, others will be rolling up their sleeves and working around the union rather than with them.

Questions put to me by journalists this week were in the main, well-informed, but there’s still a number of misconceptions that we need to address.

First and foremost, we need some clarity around what the term “phonics” means. I prefer to see the word “phonics” used as an adjective, with a noun to follow, either knowledge or instruction. Phonics knowledge is what we want children to acquire, through their instruction and through the process of statistical learning, about how speech and print map to each other in rule-governed and morphologically patterned ways in English. Phonics instruction, however, is what is delivered by teachers, in order to support this learning by students. There are a number of different approaches to phonics instruction and they vary enormously with respect to:

·         *The teacher knowledge they require about how the writing system works in English.

·         *The extent to which children are taught explicitly, with a scope and sequence.

So, we need to work hard to help the media (and by extension, the public) understand that this is not a debate about “phonics Vs no phonics”. Every primary teacher in Victoria already teaches phonics, but there is currently enormous variation in how this is done, given that responsibility for reading instruction has been devolved to individual schools. I have written previously about the fact that I believe school leaders should be demanding less rather than more autonomy on this, and that sentiment was loud and clear at the recent SOTLA-La Trobe event in Melbourne, attended by Education Minister the Hon. Ben Carroll, at which Emily Hanford was the keynote speaker. School leaders are not able or required to choose their own adventure on child safety or prevention of anaphylaxis (both issues on which evidence and recommendations continue to evolve), yet this has been the case on the core business for schools of reading instruction. This makes no sense and is the fundamental turn-around in this new policy.

So - what lies ahead?

Although there was rightly a sense of celebration and relief at this week’s announcement, we must not be starry-eyed about the challenges inherent in the implementation of new practices and equally importantly, the de-implementation of practices that need to be removed, because they are in the balanced literacy DNA – i.e., they are part of an eclectic bundle of approaches that teachers have been forced to fall back on when not adequately prepared for reading instruction by their initial teacher education.

Many schools are already on this journey, and some are established in their new practice, with data (academic and wellbeing) to attest to its effectiveness. From those who have started the journey, we at La Trobe hear many stories of the steep hill teachers have to climb to acquire new knowledge that translates into new practices. We also hear about how difficult it can be to relinquish practices that are balanced literacy comfort-zones. Here I am thinking of the following (as examples), which will all need to be de-implemented as part of this new policy:

·         *The use of three cueing strategies for teaching students to identify unfamiliar words.

·         *Sending banks of sight-words home with children for their parents to teach to them as visual wholes.

·         *The use of predictable, levelled texts as early instructional supports.

·         *Use of “letter of the week”.

·         *Use of Running Records as the go-to progress monitoring tool.

·         *The use of cute but trivialising and demeaning “strategies” like Lips the Fish, Skippy Frog, and Eagle Eye – see more in this 2024 open access paper by Kearns and Borkenhagen.

In their place, we will be looking to see:

·         *Teachers gaining expert knowledge about how the English writing system works and how oral language and written language both relate to and differ from each other.

·         *Teachers trained in, and applying one of many evidence-aligned systematic synthetic phonics programs for initial teaching of novices about how the writing system works.

·         *Reading instruction and writing instruction being closely aligned so that mastery of the English spelling system occurs for both.

·         *The use of “decodable” (phonically controlled) texts in the early stages of reading instruction, to enable children to practice the elements of the writing code to which they have been exposed, and in turn, develop the essential skills of automaticity and fluency that contribute to reading comprehension.

·        *Explicit teaching of vocabulary, sentence structure, inferencing, and background knowledge, so that the upper strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope are being developed alongside code knowledge, from the outset.  

·         *The use of rigorous progress monitoring tools that have strong psychometric properties (validity and reliability) and articulate to instructional decisions and actions. This should include the introduction of a full-scale Phonics Screening Check, not a light-touch version that under-samples the knowledge and skills in question.

I was asked by a journalist this week “How will we know we have got this right?

We will know we got this right in five years’ time if policy makers and academics are no longer falling for the fallacy of the Golden Mean and assuming that all ideas about reading instruction are worthy of a seat at the table just because some stakeholders loudly assert opinions not backed by evidence. There may well be many ways of teaching a child to read, but that does not mean they are equally effective at a population level. Government policy has to be about population level prevention of difficulties and promotion of success.

We will know we have got this right when we see gatherings of highly motivated teachers at professional learning events (invariably in unpaid time on weekends) such as Sharing Best Practice and researchED focusing their discussion on the details and nuances of classroom practice, not on the demoralising and exhausting struggles of arguing for better practice and working around colleagues who resist change – sometimes because they are anxious about it and sometimes because they have not yet had an opportunity to fully understand its rationale.

We will also know we got it right when we see public health thinking, via Response to Intervention (and its broader “home” Multi Tiered Systems of Support) employed as the conceptual framework for the ongoing planning, delivery, and review of reading instruction in Victorian schools.

We will know we have got this right when we no longer need to despairingly reflect on the poor translation into practice of recommendations such as those of the 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, that has gathered metaphorical dust on virtual shelves for nearly 20 years.

No society can afford (or justify) the level of reading failure described in the recent Grattan Reading Guarantee Report and no system can resource the intervention services such levels of failure necessitate. Let’s not forget too, the downstream consequences of low literacy in the form of mental health/substance abuse problems, unemployment, involvement with the criminal justice system, and unstable housing. These are all burdens unfairly distributed to children who start from behind in the first place.

As the adult village around our children, we must therefore, not squander the opportunity afforded by the Education Minister’s announcement this week.   

© Pamela Snow (2024)