Australia’s schools have too many ‘instructional casualties’

“All these teachers kept saying, ‘It will be fine. Just wait.’ Because Lisa is a well-mannered, quiet kid, she slipped under the radar,” Michelle said.

Frustrated, Michelle eventually moved Lisa to a new school in Year 3. Her new teacher quickly saw that something wasn’t right, and further testing revealed Lisa had dyslexia. Since then, she’s been getting intensive support from her teacher. Now, Lisa is making progress.

This story is all too common. Even though learning to read is a key focus of the early years of school, Australia still has too many “instructional casualties” like Lisa — students who could learn to read proficiently but don’t because they haven’t received the teaching or additional support they need.

These students are at risk of falling further behind all through school.

Making sure students don’t fall behind

A 2023 study by the Australian Education Research Organisation found that only about one in five students who performed at or below the NAPLAN national minimum standard in Year 3 caught-up and stayed on track through to Year 9.

But evidence shows how to fix this problem.

First, all children should be taught how to read through systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics; exposure to rich literature through read-alouds; and explicit teaching to build vocabulary, fluency and background knowledge.

As students master the ability to decode new words in early primary school, they can switch from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”.

From here, students still need explicit teaching that deepens their knowledge and vocabulary all through school, so they can comprehend what they read — the ultimate goal of reading.

Second, schools should implement a response-to-intervention approach, which quickly catches any students who are falling behind and provides them with extra support to get back on track.

Giving students the skills to be successful

Some schools are already doing this, with great results. At Churchill Primary School — a small regional Victorian school serving a low socio-economic community — the way reading is taught has changed dramatically since the principal took the helm in 2017.

Previously, students were not systematically taught to decode and were instead given a lot of independent reading time, even when they could not yet read. As a result, students were often disruptive and classes sometimes chaotic. Struggling students were not catching up, and NAPLAN results were consistently poor.

Now lessons look very different. Teaching is fast-paced, engaging and explicit — teachers break down the learning, model each step and keep checking that students grasp the content by asking questions or having students write responses on mini-whiteboards.

In Foundation, teachers follow a systematic sequence, with students learning one or two letter-and-sound combinations a week.

And students and teachers now read lots of books together — a book every week in early years and a novel a term for older students. These books are carefully selected so all students are exposed to increasingly complex vocabulary and build background knowledge across subject areas such as science and humanities.

Churchill Primary School has an established process for helping students to catch-up. All students are screened upon arrival, and struggling students are identified.

In junior years, a literacy specialist supervises trained teaching assistants to support about 25 students in small groups four times a week. A speech therapist provides one-on-one twice-weekly support for a small number of students with language disorders.

Results have come quickly. In 2016, almost half of the Year 3 students and 65 per cent of Year 5 students did not meet national minimum standards in reading. By 2021, no student performed below this standard for reading, and Year 3 students did better than the state average.

Today, fewer students receive catch-up support because fewer students need it. And student behaviour has also improved — within three years, there has been a 70 per cent reduction in students being sent out of class for poor behaviour.

The students are enjoying school more too. “Our kids read more than ever. They enjoy it, because they have the skills now to be successful,” one school leader said.

Schools need more help

Schools like Churchill Primary show us the scale of the effort required to switch to and sustain high-quality practice, including significant investment in new curriculum materials and intensive training for all staff.

Schools need more help to get this in place.

Here’s what state and territory governments should do to ensure every child is taught how to read well, regardless of where they go to school.

1. Governments should publicly commit to ensuring at least 90 per cent of Australian students learn to read proficiently at school.

2. They should give schools and teachers specific, practical guidelines on how to best teach reading; practical tools such as validated reading programs and curriculum materials; and assessment schedules.

3. Governments should put the right curriculum materials in the hands of teachers — by providing grants to enable schools to purchase materials that are quality-assured, and by phasing out materials that are not aligned with the evidence about the best ways to teach reading.

4. They should require all primary schools to screen students’ reading skills at least twice a year from Foundation to Year 2, and provide extra help to students struggling with reading.

5. Governments should ensure primary teachers have the training they need to build students’ reading skills. This should include setting essential training requirements for primary teachers, developing new quality-assured micro-credentials, creating literacy instructional specialists in every primary school, and establishing demonstration schools to spread best practice.

6. Governments should mandate a nationally consistent Year 1 Phonics Screening Check to assess students’ decoding skills. This would provide a useful “health check” on early reading performance and help target support to poor-performing schools.

All this will take political will and a long-term commitment to change. But the effort will be worth it if it gives students like Lisa the best chance of reading success.

* Names have been changed.