ACT Alliance for Evidence-Based Education calls for literacy teaching overhaul in ACT public schools

The ACT Alliance for Evidence-Based Education has put in a submission to the 2023-24 territory budget detailing several measures that would improve instruction of reading at a modest cost.

The group of parents, speech pathologists, teachers and researchers formed last year with the common concern ACT children were getting left behind in literacy.

The alliance is calling for a chief literacy officer to be employed to oversee a team of literacy coaches to provide training for teachers in the explicit and systematic instruction of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

It is also calling for a universal year 1 phonics screening check and new decodable reading books for students in kindergarten and year 1.

The alliance has estimated it would cost $500,000 to purchase of decodable readers and up to $2 million per year for the remaining measures, based on spending in South Australia and NSW.

But the ACT Education Directorate says schools already use a systematic, evidence-based approach to literacy instruction.

Equity Economics consultant Jessica Del Rio wrote the alliance's submission and is working on an upcoming report with funding from the Snow Foundation.

"It's been pretty well-documented that teacher trainees at university are not getting the training they need in literacy," Ms Del Rio said.

"They're often taught about teaching a love of literacy, but not necessarily the fundamental skills that are needed to become literate. And so that leaves a gap for the teachers who are currently in the system that they need coaching on the job in how to teach children to become literate."

The alliance points to the need for urgent action due to NAPLAN results which consistently show ACT students failing to met their potential compared with students of a similar socioeconomic background in the rest of Australia.

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Outcomes for Indigenous students are significantly worse than non-Indigenous students and grows as students remain at school, while ACT is also under-reporting students with a cognitive disability, the budget submission said.

Ms Del Rio said ACT public schools had autonomy to choose teaching methodologies for reading and many were relying on the three cueing method as part of a balanced literacy approach.

"It's based on an idea about how children become literate which assumes that children become literate if they have these good guessing strategies," Ms Del Rio said.

"And that works for about 80 per cent of kids, but not for all kids. Therefore children who have difficulty with cognitive load, what they need is an ability to sound out words through phonics. And when phonics is taught it works for 95 per cent of kids."

The chief literacy officer would be responsible for overseeing a change management process similar to the Catalyst program in Catholic schools in the Canberra Goulburn Archdiocese, Ms Del Rio said.

South Australia was the first state to introduce a phonics check in 2018. Tasmania and NSW started phonics checks in 2021 and Victoria and Western Australia have started checks this year.

South Australia saw significant improvement in the ability of year 1 students to decode and blend letters into words since starting the reforms. In 2018 only 43 per cent of students reached the benchmark but by 2021, 67 per cent met the expected achievement level.

Jen Cross' son struggled to learn to read in a public school from kindergarten to year 4 before switching to an independent school. He was diagnosed with dyslexia and eventually learned to read through the MultiLit program, which is based on explicit instruction.

She was confident his condition would have been picked up much sooner if there was a phonics check in year 1.

Speech pathologist Scarlett Gaffey said many of the children she sees did not have access to decodable readers, which are used in teaching systematic synthetic phonics, as many schools have heavily invested in predictable readers which encourage guessing words.

"This was the major thing that's been worrying me in Canberra," Mrs Gaffey said.

"When you're guessing words, it's not reading. You're memorising. The fundamental skill is to sound out and blend letters into words."

She said some children are able to get funding through the NDIS to buy decodable readers.

"Teachers are buying their own to use with the class because the schools aren't always supportive, because they don't understand them at this point," she said.

"Lots of kids will learn to read despite what books they've got. They sort of crack the code themselves. But about 20 per cent are really not going to do well at all, which is a lot of kids. And it's really expensive to get tutoring so we're really relying on schools to teach this well."

An ACT Education Directorate spokeswoman said public primary schools used the 10 Essential Instructional Practices in Literacy and had literacy champions or coaches to support the program in each school.

"These practices draw from a broad base of research to inform reading instruction and include explicit teaching of phonological awareness and systematic phonics instruction, as well as other components of reading such as fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension," the spokeswoman said.

The new version of the Australian Curriculum has removed references to predictable texts and the three cueing system and focused early reading on phonic knowledge.

The directorate spokesperson would not say if there would be any funding in the June budget to support the rollout of the new curriculum or any of the three measures the alliance calls for.

"Work is already under way to support ACT public schools to engage with Version 9.0 of the Australian Curriculum, in preparation for implementation in 2024," they said.

"Nominated school curriculum leaders in ACT public schools are working with the Education Directorate's curriculum team to determined what tailored support individual schools need in the transition to Version 9.0."

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