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Emeritus Professor Max Coltheart has prepared a letter to ACARA on behalf of the members of the Developmental Disorders of Language and Literacy (DDoLL) network, a group of reading researchers, cognitive scientists, teachers, principals, speech pathologists, linguists, and specialist practitioners who are concerned about effective instruction and intervention for all students.

In the same week that federal education minister Alan Tudge reiterated his aspiration to take Australia back to the top of the international school education rankings, pointing to improved results in the United Kingdom and Poland for inspiration, the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has drawn its inspiration from elsewhere and released a proposed revision of the Australian Curriculum that doesn’t seem likely to move Australian schools in the desired direction of travel.

Innovation is always on the agenda in education but the COVID pandemic in 2020 made it a top priority. Many schools made a swift and more or less successful transition to online teaching. The schools that did this most successfully were largely those that were already high functioning schools, with strong collaborative teaching cultures and robust systems in place. The widespread adoption of technology for teaching was not a ‘disruptive’ force that changed the traditional stratifications in education systems.

In the world of reading instruction, the terms print-to-speech and speech-to-print have become confusing and unnecessarily divisive. This is because they have been used to categorise both the composite skills required for competent reading and spelling, and whole frameworks within which these composite skills can be taught.

The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check was introduced in all English primary schools in 2012. Since then, there have been substantial improvements in Year 1 and 2 students’ decoding skills as measured by the Check, and promising signs of improvement in standardised reading assessments in later years.

The latest report from Julie Sonneman and Peter Goss at the Grattan Institute was published on Monday. The Grattan report didn’t get a lot of media attention because the more obviously newsworthy part of the report – estimates of learning losses — was gazumped by a CIS report a few weeks ago.

At the start of last year, 17,000 ­­12- and 13-year-olds walked into high school classrooms all across the country unable to read even at a minimal level. They achieved scores below the minimum standard in the Year 7 National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy reading test. A further 35,000 students achieved only the minimum standard, in which they can barely find basic information in simple written text. Similar numbers of students achieved at and below the minimum standard in Year 5 in 2017 and in Year 3 in 2015, indicating their literacy difficulties had been identified but never remediated.

The ‘Flexible Learning for Remote Primary Schools’ (FLRPS) program was funded by the Australian Government in 2014 for the implementation of Direct Instruction (DI) and Explicit Direct Instruction in 34 remote and very remote schools in Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory. The programme was funded on the basis of extensive research showing DI’s effectiveness in improving academic outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged and minority children in the US. The FLRPS program was delivered by Good to Great Schools Australia with an initial implementation period of three years which was subsequently extended to 2019.

Jeffrey Bowers has been arguing for some time that systematic phonics instruction does not have a strong evidence base in its favour, via seminar and conference presentations and social media. Bowers believes there is a strong consensus that systematic phonics instruction is effective in early reading instruction and that this consensus is unwarranted

The earth has revolved around the sun three times since the last set of results from the OECD’s international student assessments known as PISA – Program for International Student Assessment — were released. Unfortunately, Australia has once again slipped against global standards.

NAPLAN has been in the political cross-hairs since it was introduced in 2008. It becomes big news at least four times year – when the tests are held in May, when the preliminary national results are released in September, when the full national report is published in the following March, and when the My School website is updated with the individual school results in April.

Adult, skilled readers often underestimate the complexity of learning to read. A few children seem to acquire reading spontaneously and with apparent ease, but most need to be taught how to do it. Without proficient reading skills, children struggle to spell and write. Literacy also affects numeracy, because if children cannot read the question they will not be able to formulate an answer. Ability to read underpins success across the entire school curriculum.