The path from ideology to evidence

Submission to the Inquiry into the State Education System in Victoria

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There are many issues facing education in Victoria. Three of these are the quality reading instruction, the quality of mathematics instruction and classroom behaviour and the impact this behaviour has on wellbeing. We need to adopt evidence-based methods for teaching reading, embracing structured literacy and a knowledge-rich curriculum. We need to adopt an explicit approach to teaching mathematics and support this by producing detailed curriculum materials. We need to conduct a classroom behaviour survey to begin identifying good practice and moving to a more pragmatic approach.

I am a teacher in an independent Victorian school and so I am not directly involved with the state education system. However, I coordinated the Australian branch of researchED, a grass-roots organisation originating in the UK, for a number of years. I also write a popular newsletter about education. Through these avenues, I have engaged in many conversations with Victorian government schoolteachers, both in mainstream and specialist schools.

There are therefore many comments I could make about the Victorian education system. However, in this submission, I will restrict myself to three areas – reading, mathematics, and wellbeing and classroom disruption.

Reading and the phonics check

Phonics involves teaching children the relationships between the letters in a word and the sounds those letters represent. Since the 2000 publication of the US’s National Reading Panel report (NIHCD, 2000), it has been clear that structured literacy, an approach that includes but is not limited to the systematic teaching of phonics, is the most effective form of early reading instruction. The National Reading Panel findings do not mean that students cannot learn from alternatives that avoid systematic phonics teaching, but that structured literacy is the most efficient method and the one through which the greatest proportion of children will learn to read. It is a best bet.

Unfortunately, this finding has been resisted by many in the education sector. For ideological reasons, they view the explicit teaching of letter-sound relationships much as they view explicit teaching more generally – as oppressive (see e.g. Freire, 2000). Scepticism of structured literacy may also be related to the tendency to see schooling as artificial and the wish to make it more natural. However, this is a mistake. As David C. Geary has argued, we have evolved to learn certain things naturally, such as our local language. Nobody sits us in a room and instructs us where to place out tongue to make the letter ‘S’. We just pick these things up through immersion. However, reading and writing are too recent a cultural invention for us to have evolved an effortless way to learn these skills (Geary, 1995).

In England[1], considerable progress has been made against such resistance. In 2006, Jim Rose published a review commissioned by the UK government into effective reading instruction that echoed the findings of the National Reading Panel in the US and cast doubt on the ‘cuing systems’ approach developed by alternatives to systematic literacy instruction such as supposedly ‘balanced’ literacy (Rose, 2006).

Initially, the Rose Report had limited impact, perhaps because teachers preferred their established methods and perhaps due to anti-phonics advocacy from notable critics such as the children’s author, Michael Rosen (see e.g. Rosen, 2012).

In response, in 2012, the UK government, a coalition of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, introduced a phonics screening check. This consists of 40 words for children in the first year of formal schooling to read to their teacher – 20 normal words and 20 nonwords. The nonwords are presented to the children as the names of alien creatures such as ‘smung’ and ‘besh.’ The purpose of these nonwords is to check whether children have learnt the relationships between the letters and the sounds they represent. This cannot be done with normal words because it is possible the students have met these before and memorised them whole.

Although a relatively crude instrument, this measure, and the professional development it precipitated, seems to have had an impact on teaching and learning. In 2021, PIRLS, an international study of reading ability, assessed English students as performing significantly above the international median score, holding steady in performance in a context where most education systems experienced significant drops, likely related to the pandemic. Both the gender gap and the gap between lowest-scoring and highest-scoring students have decreased in England over time and more than half reach the High International Benchmark, compared to an international median of 36% (Lindorff et al., 2023).

However, the resistance to what has become known as the ‘science of reading’ is still strong in Victoria. The newly introduced Victorian version of the phonics check contains only ten words, of which only five are nonwords (Grace, 2023a). It also persists in using outdated practices such as assessing, ‘Running Records,’ (EducationHQ News Team, 2023).