At last, Victoria acts to boost reading

Victorian Minister for Education Ben Carroll has just announced that all government primary schools will be required to teach children in Prep to Year 2 how to read according to the best evidence on effective instruction.

This is good news for Victorian families. For decades there has been disagreement about the best way to teach students to read. The upshot has been that schools have been left to try to figure it out on their own.

This has confused teachers and undermined learning.

But the research evidence is now clear: systematically teaching students to decode the letter-sound relationships in words (that is, phonics) in the early years of primary school ensures all students have the best chance to learn to read.

Students should also be helped to develop strong vocabulary, fluency and background knowledge all through primary and secondary school, so they can comprehend the meaning of text — the ultimate purpose of reading.

The minister’s announcement sets out a clear path forward for the state — best practice should be common practice across all primary schools.

The latest NAPLAN school test results show that about a quarter of Victorian students are not meeting the new national proficiency benchmark in reading.

That’s actually better than the national average of a third of students. But Victoria is more advantaged than most other states so should be aiming higher.

Reaching proficiency matters. Children who do not learn to read fluently and efficiently are more likely to fall behind their classmates, become disruptive, and eventually drop out of school. As adults, they are more likely to end up unemployed or in poorly paid jobs.

So the minister’s announcement is a welcome step forward for Victoria.

But enforcing the policy in every one of the 1,100 government primary schools across the state will not be easy. It will require many teachers to stop using less effective teaching methods they’re familiar with and adopt new, more effective, ones.

Victoria should follow the lead of countries such as England and Ireland — and many states in the US — that have taken up this challenge to transform the way reading is taught at school.

To ensure the reform stays on track, we recommend the Victorian government commit publicly to a long-term target of 90 per cent of Victorian students reaching the NAPLAN proficiency benchmark in reading.

Unfortunately, most Victorian school principals and teachers have not been trained in best-practice reading instruction, so the minister’s announcement will need to be backed by sustained government investment in professional development for all primary teachers, and comprehensive curriculum materials and assessment tools to support day-to-day teaching.

The government should recruit and train literacy-focused instructional specialists and embed them in all primary schools.

Mississippi — the US state with the highest rate of poverty — can be a model. It was one of the first states to implement comprehensive, evidence-informed literacy reforms.

It invested US$70 million in early years reading programs for schools and fully funded all early years teachers to do a 160-hour, two-year training course in reading instruction.

Mississippi lifted the proportion of students who met the “basic” standard in reading in Year 4 from 53 per cent (in 2013) to 63 per cent (in 2022).

We also recommend Victoria joins NSW, South Australia, the Northern Territory and Tasmania in mandating the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check for all schools — government and non-government — and publishing the aggregate results so Victorian parents know whether the reading reforms are working.

In the classroom, Victorian teachers should check that students are on track by screening reading skills at least twice a year, from Prep to Year 2, using evidence-based assessments.

If a child fails to learn to read in those first few years of school, they will struggle to switch from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”, and they are likely to fall further behind.

Students found to be struggling should be given additional tutoring to help them catch up to their classmates.

The government should also make the existing reviews of schools’ performance more rigorous. The reviews should include a close examination of the way reading is being taught, and the quality of the curriculum materials being used, in each school.

Victoria’s reading revolution must start now. The future prosperity of the state — and the life chances of every Victorian child — depends on it.