Spelfabet

Autonomy’s great if it delivers success

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The Australian Education Union dislikes our state’s new requirement to teach explicit, systematic, synthetic phonics in the early years, saying teachers already do phonics, must not be told how to do their jobs, weren’t properly consulted, and won’t cooperate. However, many teachers, including AEU members, are pleased by this new requirement. They see it as a vital social justice measure and a way to cut teacher workloads, and are disappointed by the AEU’s response. Teacher James Dobson writes about this here.

I’m not sure why being told to do something you already do is a problem. Everyone is told how to do their jobs, including self-employed folk like me. I’m working on my Speech Pathology Australia Certification, and must comply with Fair Work, NDIS, Medicare, ATO and many other requirements.

The reading/learning science movement has been growing like topsy for years, so I’d be surprised if Education Ministers and the AEU haven’t had plenty of discussions about how to best teach literacy. Having been a union rep myself, I’d be amazed if AEU members went to the barricades to defend teaching approaches which lack strong evidence, or the resulting high differentiation workloads.

Teacher autonomy (not evidence-based practice) gets top priority in the recently-updated AEU Pedagogy Policy. Perhaps whoever invited Barbara Arrowsmith to speak at the AEU office in 2017 led the policy review process. Has teacher autonomy been working well for this state’s struggling readers, and their teachers, who have a right to do high-quality work, and to see their students succeed?

New VAGO report

A new state Auditor-General (VAGO) report says our Education Department isn’t getting good value for the $1.2 billion dollars being spent over five years on its Tutor Learning Initiative. There’s substantial evidence (e.g. here and here) that high-quality, intensive small group intervention can help struggling readers catch up. Across the state in 2023, tutored kids’ test scores increased more than the median increase for all kids (great!), but less than matched kids who weren’t tutored (oh dear).

I’m sure many skilled, experienced tutors who understand reading/learning research provided high-quality intervention in many schools, and their students made a lot of progress. But what were tutors doing elsewhere? Balanced literacy (a balance of things that work and things that don’t)? Other ineffective programs/approaches? VAGO says tutoring was generally timely, but there were problems with targeting intervention, and making it appropriate to school context and student need. Workforce problems mainly affected secondary and F-12 schools.

VAGO concludes that many schools’ tutoring was not effective, and recommends a statewide, staged roll-out of effective programs. Data the Education Department already collects should be used to drive improvement. Absolutely.

What does good intervention look like?

Most kids who struggle to read and write have difficulty at the word level. Kids’ word-level reading and spelling improves when they do a LOT of well-targeted and sequenced reading and writing practice. If watching a Tutor Learning Initiative literacy session, I’d mainly want to see kids with eyes on text (in books, games, whatever) as they read aloud, or pencils in hand, writing, then reading back what they’ve written. I’d want to see tutors providing well-organised and sequenced, fast-paced work with immediate feedback and encouragement. They’d be helping kids get their reps up, and slam-dunk words into long-term memory for instant retrieval and thus fluency.

Take a look at the 90 second video about the Tutor Learning Initiative here: www.vic.gov.au/tutor-learning-initiative. I see children walking, sitting, talking, smiling … but can you see any children reading or writing? What does this mean? I’m not sure, but I’d promote this initiative with a very different video.

System support for the best teaching and learning

The AEU’s submission to our recent state government inquiry into education says on p2:

“Geoffrey Robertson KC correctly argues that “a real revolution in education will only come when a government ensures that its state schools set the standard of excellence. Then and only then will we have equity.” The idea of equality draws on notions that all people in our society are of equal value. This democratic principle is crucial to underpinning the provision of public schooling. Only through proper and fair funding of our schools and a system focused on supporting school staff to provide the best teaching and learning programs that then (sic) we can achieve equity.”

Typo/grammar aside, I couldn’t agree more. It’s time to close the school funding gap. I hope the Federal Next Steps report ensures that future Initial Teacher Education graduates know how to teach reading and spelling fast and well. I hope ongoing Tutor Learning Initiative improvements, and implementation of the VAGO report’s recommendations, help stacks of struggling kids catch up with their peers in 2025. And I hope AEU members can persuade their leaders that early, explicit, systematic phonics is (to paraphrase Snow and Juel) helpful to all children and their teachers, harmful to none, and crucial for some, and that autonomy to wander in the literacy pedagogy wilderness is highly overrated.