Ideas@TheCentre
‘F’ for flawed literacy report
One of Adrian Piccoli’s first acts as NSW education minister was to establish a Ministerial Advisory Group on Literacy and Numeracy. The brief for this group was to provide ‘expert advice on early literacy and numeracy learning,’ with the purpose of guiding education policy in NSW.
It’s a good idea in theory, but there’s a problem. The advisory group’s report is full of errors, omissions and misrepresentations.
The most egregious example is the report’s explanation of the Response to Intervention (RtI) approach to reading instruction. In a RtI model, students are taught to read in increasingly intensive ‘tiers’ of instruction, typically three tiers, with regular testing to monitor their progress. Tier 1 is high quality, whole class instruction, which will be successful for most children. Struggling students are given Tier 2 instruction, which is supplementary teaching in small groups. Students who do not respond to the Tier 2 intervention require a higher intensity of instruction. These students are offered Tier 3 intervention, which is one-to-one instruction.
The advisory group endorses RtI. But, unfortunately, the report gets the concept of RtI wrong at the outset, describing Tier 1 instruction as ‘personalisation of learning’ - the exact opposite of the correct definition. This is a critical error that undermines the credibility of the report, and leads to a series of contradictory and insupportable recommendations.
Unfortunately, this flawed report exemplifies the muddled literacy policy development and implementation in NSW. In 2009, the NSW Department of Education released three very good teaching guides, two of which clearly set out the essential place of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics in balanced early reading programs. The other guide emphasised the importance of a sound evidence basis in selecting literacy strategies and techniques. Yet there was no coordinated attempt to ensure that all NSW public schools use well-designed, evidence-based literacy programs.
Instead, numerous public schools have been compelled to implement initial reading programs that have no published research demonstrating their efficacy, and which do not include the components of effective literacy identified in international research reviews.
We know what teaching strategies are most likely to work; we know how important it is to identify struggling readers and intervene early; and we know that the costs of failing to do so are immeasurable. Getting early reading instruction right is arguably the most important thing any school or school system can do. Minister Piccoli has not been given good advice about how to achieve that goal.
Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and is undertaking a research project on literacy and social disadvantage at Macquarie University.
