A senior Bendigo-based researcher has called for improvements to teacher training, citing ‘catastrophic’ consequences for children who fail to become competent in literacy at the developmentally appropriate time.
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“If you leave school with low literacy levels, you are probably going to have low literacy levels for the rest of your life, unless something major happens,” La Trobe Rural Health School head Professor Pamela Snow said.
“We have a workforce that increasingly demands high literacy levels. We have fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled workers.
“Those jobs have been disappearing because of automation and technology.”
The future for students who have not achieved literacy benchmarks in their first three years of schooling can be bleak.
Professor Snow, a speech pathologist and psychologist, started asking questions about early literacy instruction because of her research into young people in the youth justice system.
She realised many had separated from education at an early age and had low language skills, but the capacity to learn.
“We shouldn’t be waiting for the problems to become that complex,” Professor Snow said.
“If we invested better in early instruction, we would have less need for resources for struggling students, because we should have fewer struggling students.
“As a nation, we have been lazy about translating scientific evidence into practice and we need to take better advantage of the evidence that has already been collected.”
Evidence showed children, especially those starting from behind, would gain particular benefit from more explicit instruction about how to decode the relationship between sounds and letters, Professor Snow said.
But she said ‘reading wars’ – conflicting ideologies – about best practice teaching methods meant that approach was unevenly delivered in Australian classrooms.
Primary school teachers should be better provided with the scientific principles underlying reading instruction, Professor Snow said.
“Our teaching workforce, through no fault of their own, are not always equipped with that knowledge,” she said.
“Until we start doing that, I don’t think we’re going to see the [student] results shift.”
Professor Snow’s comments came after she was selected to sit on a panel aimed at improving the literacy and numeracy skills of the nation’s Grade 1 primary school students.
The six person panel was formed in response to national and international reports that last year exposed a widening gap between Australia’s high and low achieving students, and declining educational performance.
Maldon school spelling out success
About three years ago, Maldon Primary School principal Jodie Mengler decided it was time to make a change.
There was scope to improve the students’ academic performance. To get the best out of her pupils, she made an investment in her staff.
With the help of an international educational consultant and a teaching and learning coach, the school implemented a professional development program.
“My focus was around building the capacity of the teachers,” Ms Mengler said.
Ensuring consistency in the programs the teachers were implementing was another priority.
The benefits have been evident in the students’ improved results, which earned the school The Australian’s recognition as the fourth most improved primary school in the nation in the three years to 2016.
Ms Mengler said the professional development had given the staff the confidence they were teaching the children what they needed to know.
By using programs and models that had been successful in other Australian and international schools, she said the teachers were no longer trying to reinvent the wheel.
However, she said teachers constantly had to build on their skills.
“The staff we’ve got are very good at building on their knowledge,” Ms Mengler said.
Spelling, grammar and punctuation are the focus of this year’s programs.
Maldon Primary School kindly let us sit in on a Jolly Phonics class. Witness the wonder that is learning to read:
The school has about 95 students, divided into five composite classes.
Ms Burdett said the Jolly Phonics program had been great in getting the children to learn all the sounds of letters, rather than just the letter names.
“It helps them then attack all the words when they’re reading by using the sounds rather than trying to remember all the words,” she said.
In her 17 years of teaching, she said she had mostly been with the upper end and middle school.
“Now I’m down at the lower, which is great… I know where they’ve got to be so it’s good to get into the bottom part and get them up there,” Ms Burdett said.
“They’re little sponges – they just take it all in.”
Literacy capacity set for a boost
While speaking about initiatives intended to boost the city’s literacy levels, Leah Sertori was surrounded by the generation the Bendigo Business Council most hoped to help.
From a children’s play centre, she briefed the Bendigo Advertiser on initiatives intended to promote and advance Bendigo as an education city.
Ms Sertori said the Education City initiative had a particular focus on Bendigo becoming a hub for regional students to complete their tertiary qualifications.
That said, the business council last year launched a A Decade of Investment in Early Childhood Literacy.
The initiative aims at improving children’s literacy skills, particularly those with which they are equipped before starting primary school.
A quarter of Australian children are starting school without the literacy skills they need to learn and succeed, Ms Sertori said.
Families with children aged up to five years can opt to receive a new book each month as part of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library Bendigo.
Books are provided to the families of newborn babies and children deemed at risk of becoming academically vulnerable as part of Books for Babies and Let’s Read.
Businesses can become involved in the Book Box Library Program, which will provide books to be made available to children to read, borrow, swap and return – free of charge.
Ms Sertori said improving literacy skills was a whole-of-community responsibility.
“We’re all in this together,” she said.
Meanwhile, the business council is working towards becoming a ‘smart city’ – a regional pilot of a future-focused federal government initiative.
Ms Sertori said Bendigo’s bid had education at its heart.
Representatives are making a formal presentation to Cities and Digital Transformation Assistant Minister Angus Taylor in February.
Ms Sertori said the outcome of Bendigo’s bid, which had received support from the state government, would likely be known shortly afterwards.
A three-day hackathon will be held in Bendigo from April 10-12, with support from the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning.