This
appeared last week:
This school has joined the education revolution. What about your kids?
Australian schools are finally catching up with a back to
basics revolution that is lifting results all over the world.
Julie
Hare Education editor
Aug 16, 2024 – 1.30pm
Steve Capp’s decision to get on board a grassroots movement
that is shaking up Australian classrooms came after he witnessed the power of
taking an evidence-based approach to how children are taught.
In the short time he has been principal at Chelsea Heights
Primary School on Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula, Capp’s approach has borne
fruit. The proportion of children in his school above the national benchmark in
literacy has jumped from 69 to 90 per cent.
“That’s just grade three and in only one year,” Capp says.
The approach, which has been dismissed and contested by much
of the educational fraternity for decades, is a kind of back-to-basics approach which uses explicit
instruction and a structured and sequenced approach to delivering new
information.
“It’s about getting the basics right,” says Capp. “If you
can’t spell, you can’t put good sentences together, never mind paragraphs.”
The school has seen improvements not only with children who
previously struggled but also with high achievers after finding they can be
extended. At the same time, behaviour has improved so much there is almost no
need for disciplinary action.
The approach adopted at Chelsea Heights is building up a
head of steam in schools across Australia as a growing number of teachers and
principals became increasingly frustrated by the underperformance of the
children in their charge.
There are changes in how classrooms are structured, and how
teachers instruct their pupils. Gone are group desk formations. Rows of desks
are back. Explicit instruction replaces curiosity-led learning. Phonics
replaces whole language. Learning is disaggregated into bite-sized chunks that
can be committed to memory and called on as necessary.
Not so long ago, this systematic style of teaching was
considered old-fashioned and thought to suffocate creativity. But now federal
Education Minister Jason Clare is demanding the states and territories that
receive the bulk of public school funding go down the route of Chelsea Heights
Primary School.
Experts say it’s the revolution we have to have as the
nation reels from two decades of decline then stagnation on national and
international tests.
A baseless theory
It seems bizarre, almost unbelievable in fact, that
universities have for at least four decades being peddling a baseless theory of
early literacy and reading – the whole-word approach – that has undermined the
educational attainment of millions of children and sabotaged many adulthoods.
The cost of that experiment in what has been dubbed “pseudoscience” has been high for millions who have passed
through the education system over the past few decades and left without the
reading, writing and numeracy skills to be able to function effectively as an
adult.
This year’s National Assessment Program – Literacy and
Numeracy (NAPLAN) has provided yet another sad
indictment on the impact of that prevailing orthodoxy.
One in three children is behind on where they should be at
their stage of learning, one in 10 desperately so. The poorer a child is and
the further away from a major city they live, the worse their results are.
One in 10 are so far behind they are at a high risk of
becoming functionally illiterate as adults.
As The Australian Financial Review pointed out,
NAPLAN has become a closer measure
of family wealth than of student ability. It’s a sad fact that wealthy kids
do well at school, poor kids don’t.
Today, as many as 40 per cent of year 9 boys and one in
three girls are functionally illiterate, according to the latest NAPLAN scores.
That has vast implications for their future lives – and for the nation’s
productivity.
The evidence of Australia’s educational malaise is not
limited to NAPLAN. On the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment
(PISA), just three in every five 15-year-olds can read at the “national
proficient standard” – which is not very demanding – and just over half reach
that benchmark for numeracy.
Finally, though, there is hope of a turnaround. The voice of
reason, backed by science and evidence, is finally winning.
Experts largely agree on four things. First, money is
important, but Australia is spending too much in the wrong places. Second,
geographical differences in student performance are a national embarrassment.
Third, the gender divide in academic performance needs a lot of attention.
Finally, behaviour issues and school attendance are at all-time lows and that
is in no small way linked to what is happening – or not happening – in
classrooms.
Failing the majority
Whole-word and student-led learning might work for the
brightest children, but they fail the majority. An analysis of NAPLAN writing
data, which took in 10 million results spanning 2011 to 2021, found that the
ability to write persuasively – or to be able to clearly organise thoughts and
construct an argument supported by reasoning and evidence – has been declining
over the past decade, even among the most high-achieving students, as the gap
between high- and low-performing students became wider.
The dire state of Australia’s school education system, in
particular its failure to pick up and remediate children at the lower end of
the achievement spectrum, was writ large in a Productivity Commission report released last year.
The terse report was overflowing with data and facts that
should be unacceptable in a developed economy such as Australia’s.
It found that despite a 21 per cent increase in student
funding in the decade since the Gonski funding began, there had been no
noticeable improvements in student learning outcomes.
Students who live outside major cities are, on average, 1.75
years behind their city cousins in literacy and two years behind in numeracy.
The poorest 25 per cent of kids are 2.75 years behind rich kids in reading and
three years behind in numeracy.
Melbourne University’s dean of education, Professor Jim
Watterston, has previously pointed out that Australia has four education
systems based on geography.
“It’s like a stepladder. If you take the eight metropolitan
cities, students are as good as anywhere in the world. When you get to
regional, it’s one step down where outcomes are average. When you go down
another step to rural, the outcomes are really poor – and by the time we get to
remote and rural, then we are in a Third World country,” Watterston says.
Proof outside Australia
Australia is late to the party, where the case for
evidence-based learning from overseas is compelling. One needs only to look to
Mississippi in the United States. One of the poorest states, it is ranked worst
in the country for child poverty and hunger, highest in teen births, and
third-last for adults with a high school diploma or equivalent.
However, since teachers started receiving training in
scientifically based reading instruction with coaches embedded in schools, and
additional intervention for all students having difficulty learning to read,
the turnaround has been staggering.
As education advocate Leslie Loble points out: “The results
from Mississippi show that students experiencing severe disadvantage are not
only able to improve beyond previous state levels, they are improving so much
they are overtaking other states in national rankings.
“Mississippi is one of only two states with improved
fourth-grade maths scores over the past decade, and one of only three states
with gains in fourth-grade reading over the decade.”
Over the past 10 to 15 years, the literacy and numeracy
skills of children in England have improved measurably and significantly
compared to most other high-income countries.
On PISA tests, England eclipses the G7 average and
outperforms the OECD average – despite a squeeze on school funding over much of
this period.
While England is middle of the pack on inequality, among
OECD nations only Canada, Estonia, Ireland and Japan manage to deliver both
stronger average attainment and lower inequality than England.
“This speaks to the success of teachers, schools and
policymakers in improving the productivity of England’s education system,”
reads a research paper released in June by the Institute of Fiscal studies.
This is despite, as in Australia, rising incidence of
absenteeism, poor mental health, and the lagged effects on academic performance
of lockdowns during COVID-19.
England’s success in turning around the academic performance
of its students began in 1997 when Tony Blair became prime minister. He was
hailed for saying his top three priorities in government were “education,
education, education”.
At the time, England’s school system was sadly lacking
compared to other industrialised nations. But the Blair government put in place
ambitious standards, clear targets and straightforward accountability measures,
while also increasing funding to improve the professional development of the
teacher workforce.
Ross Fox is director of Catholic Education Canberra Goulburn
(CECG), which has taken a system-wide approach to what is taught, how it is
taught and how it is assessed.
This approach systematically builds one piece of learning on
top of another to ensure students master key concepts before progressing to
more advanced areas.
“Teachers realise that what they’ve been relying on as their
knowledge base to achieve high-quality teaching and learning is insufficient,”
Fox says, adding that much has been invested in professional development.
“Students learn in the right sequence. Teachers check in
with high frequency that what they have taught is being learned. We need to
make precious use of the million minutes that students have with us from
kindergarten to year 12 and ensure they are engaged from the highest possible
expectation of cognitive tasks.”
The diocese, which takes in the south-east coast of NSW, has
since 2019 produced statistically significant improvements in NAPLAN reading in
year 3 and year 5.
For example, the average year 3 reading score for children
in CECG in 2023 was 422, while the national average was just 404. In numeracy,
the score was 419 against a national average of 407.
While the comparative lead by year 5 is not as dramatic,
it’s still there. In reading, for example, the average across CECG is 506 while
the national average is 496. For numeracy, CECG children scored an average of
490, slightly above the national average of 487.
A survey of teachers in CECG found four in five agreed that
using high-impact teaching methods meant students learned more and that it was
worth the time and effort to implement.
Back to the lab
Professor Pam Snow and her college Professor Tanya Serry
from La Trobe University were so frustrated with the lack of foundational
understanding of the science of learning and explicit instruction most teachers
had after graduating from university, they set up their own short course – the
Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab – in 2020.
The lab takes the basic principle that teaching is largely a
science, not an art. They were gravely concerned that most graduates were
leaving their courses without basic knowledge of explicit teaching methods, and
only the barest of skills in classroom management.
“There will not be any change in Australia’s educational
outcomes until entire systems adopt new approaches that are based in evidence,”
Snow says.
If schools were delivering evidence-based literacy programs
as a whole-school approach, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
— Stella Finch, teacher and school counsellor
“The Commonwealth government has been complicit in not
holding university education faculties to account. Teachers have to go and get
the information themselves in a really inefficient way.”
They have put 12,000 teachers through the program since it
began.
There is movement. NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, Western
Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory have all signed on to a federal
government request that they implement evidence-based teaching in their
classrooms. Only Queensland and South Australia are hold-outs as the clock
ticks for a new national funding agreement set to be signed by the end of
September.
Under current arrangements, the federal government puts up
20 per cent of funding for public schools, while the states contribute, in
theory, 80 per cent. The total annual cost is more than $9 billion in federal
money and $46 billion for the states.
The 20:80 formula was agreed under the last reform
agreement, based on businessman David Gonski’s review of school funding. It
calculated what is known as the schooling resource standard – an estimate of
how much each student needs to have their educational needs adequately met.
In 2024, the SRS funding amounts are $13,570 for primary
students and $17,053 for secondary students. The states want the federal
government to contribute 25 per cent and an additional $32 billion over 10
years. The federal government has offered 2.5 per cent and wants the states to
chip in the other 2.5 per cent.
The stand-off continues.
Shopping around
Stella Finch (not her real name) is a teacher and school
counsellor who works in public schools in Queensland. She has seen the
dysfunction when schools don’t prioritise evidence-based teaching and the
desperation of young teachers who believe they lack the resources and knowledge
to lift their students’ performance.
“If schools were delivering evidence-based literacy programs
as a whole-school approach, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” Finch says.
“I have been privy to many choose-your-own-adventure
literacy programs that are far from evidenced based. And I’ve witnessed the
resistance – or the ignorance – of principals who choose not to opt for
evidenced-based programs, even when advised otherwise.”
There is a personal edge to her professional experience –
her own son could not read by the end of year 2. Frustrated by the school’s
indifference to what was happening, she moved him to another school that had
adopted a whole-school evidence-based reading program.
Two years later, her son is close to the top band for year 5
reading on NAPLAN.
“I just hope that my story can somehow help convince our
ministers of education that putting some simple reforms in place is critical so
we are not sitting here with the same problem in 20 years.”
Here is the
link:
https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/this-school-has-joined-the-education-revolution-what-about-your-kids-20240814-p5k2ef
It really
is pretty sad what a mess we somehow seem to have wound up in!
Some have
suggested recalcitrant teaching unions may be at least part of the cause – I wonder
if it is true?
No matter
how you see it – bureaucracy is partly to blame I am sure! It is a worry we are apparently yet to really make strides towards to present state of the art - and all that can bring for our kids!
David.