On reading, we’re failing our children

Our teens continue to lag almost two-and-a-half years behind their peers in Singapore, the top performing country. They are also almost a year behind peers in Ireland, Japan, and South Korea. And our 15-year-olds performed about a year and a half behind their Australian counterparts in the first PISA assessment in 2000.

Forty-three per cent of our students did not meet Australia’s PISA proficiency benchmark for reading, and there was a cavernous gap between our advantaged and disadvantaged students – only about 40 of our disadvantaged students are proficient, compared with 75 per cent of their advantaged peers. And the gap between Australia’s lowest and highest performers is larger than the OECD average and every country that outperforms Australia.

PISA results are not just a matter of international vanity. Poor reading ability robs young people of their full potential. Our leaders should urgently address Australia’s reading woes.

Here’s what should happen.

In the early years of school, teaching should focus on 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, they can switch from learning to read to reading to learn. But they still need explicit teaching that deepens their knowledge and vocabulary, so they can comprehend what they read – the ultimate goal of reading.

This is especially important for children from disadvantaged families because those students often don’t have rich learning opportunities at home.

While most state and territory governments – except Victoria and the ACT – have now publicly committed to align teaching with this approach for young primary school students, we need to radically boost our commitment to building students’ knowledge throughout school.

By the time a 15-year-old sits the PISA test, their background knowledge and vocabulary will have a big impact on their performance. To comprehend a passage on conservation efforts in the Galapagos Islands, for example, they need to know the meaning of words such as “ecosystem”, “extinct”, “invasive species”, and “eradicate”.

Without this knowledge, they would flounder. And to do well across all the passages, they’ll need to know a lot of words – passages can be on topics as diverse as the civilisation collapse on Easter Island to the benefits of drinking cows’ milk.

These might seem like esoteric topics, but they reflect the vast range of words and issues a well-educated adult might encounter reading the newspaper, collaborating with colleagues, or engaging with strangers.

The best way to prepare young people for the reading challenges they will face in the real world is to teach them using knowledge-rich and well-sequenced curriculum materials, from Prep to Year 12.

But Australia still largely leaves this to chance.

The Australian Curriculum is surprisingly vague about the specific content teachers must cover. For example, the Year 6 Geography curriculum says students should understand ‘Australia’s interconnections with other countries and how these change people and places.’ The specific detail of what knowledge students should learn – what kind of interconnections, with what countries, what changes, and in what depth – is left for the teacher to decide. As a result, we end up with a lesson lottery: some teachers and students cover a lot while others do not.

Our governments should act now. High-quality, knowledge-rich curriculum materials that help teachers turn these vague descriptions into effective classroom teaching improve every child’s chance of success. There are several examples overseas of comprehensive, quality-assured curriculum materials, such as Core Knowledge and EL Education in the US. But there are few in Australia, especially for primary schools when solid foundations must be laid.

Curriculum materials need to be specific about what knowledge students are expected to learn, and carefully sequenced so students gradually accumulate knowledge year-on-year. The last thing our teachers need is more disconnected worksheets and activities – social media and government websites are awash with those already.

Curriculum materials should cover everything teachers need, right down to lesson-level materials – so that teachers can focus on refining their teaching and adapting their approach.

Curriculum materials should reflect the growing evidence-base for effective teaching practices, such as explicit instruction, mastery learning, and formative assessment, which make it more likely new knowledge will ‘stick’.

Curriculum materials created by governments, commercial providers, or not-for-profits should be quality-assured by a new, genuinely independent review body – similar to EdReports in the US.

Curriculum-specific professional learning for teachers and principals also needs a major boost.

The latest international results make it clear that Australia cannot continue to leave learning to read to chance.

Boosting reading outcomes in our schools would be the ultimate win-win: it would improve the life chances of every Australian child, and it would make Australia a smarter, more prosperous nation.