Australia’s education stakeholders have argued over literacy for years now. What does the fight boil down to?

Why the right and left can't stop sounding off about phonics

Why the right and left can't stop sounding off about phonics

Raymond Terrace, just north of Newcastle in New South Wales, is an unlikely place to find one of Australia’s leading advocates of rightwing education policy.

It is a town with a long history of social disadvantage, a high proportion of public housing tenants and an unemployment rate that fluctuates with the fortunes of the coalmines farther up the Hunter Valley, but it is also where Jennifer Buckingham has perhaps made her biggest impact.

Buckingham, a senior research fellow in education policy at the conservative Centre for Independent Studies thinktank and a leading advocate for private and charter school education, chose Raymond Terrace public school when her two daughters entered primary school in 2008.



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Like the rest of the town, it’s a school dealing with entrenched social disadvantage; 64% of its students are from the bottom socioeconomic quartile and a fifth are Indigenous, two key indicators of lower academic outcomes.

“The catchment we draw from includes a lot of kids coming from public housing, and students with itinerant backgrounds,” principal John Picton says. “A lot of our students come into school without very much, if any, prior learning in their background. That’s a challenge for a school, particularly from a funding point of view.”

So Buckingham decided to get involved. In 2010, she began working with Kevin Wheldall and Robyn Beaman, two education researchers from Macquarie University who developed MultiLit, a phonics-based intervention education program for kids who are struggling to learn to read.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labor leaders Tanya Plibersek and Bill Shorten visit St James Catholic Primary School, Glebe. Photograph: Dominica Sanda/AAP

The researchers began working in the school, while Buckingham completed her PhD on literacy and social disadvantage drawing her research data from the school.

The results, Picton says, were dramatic.

“I think in a lot of reading programs there is an assumption that students come into school with a language base,” he says. “But the research shows that kids from a low socio-economic background often come in with very limited vocabulary, less of an existing word, and that’s where MultiLit helped.”

Between 2008 and 2013 Raymond Terrace public saw its Naplan reading scores lift dramatically, from level-pegging with similar schools in the area to well ahead of the other primary schools in the town.

Those scores have dipped again somewhat in recent years, but Picton puts that down to the funding for the intervention program drying up – his enthusiasm for Buckingham and phonics instruction remains undimmed.

“We’re very fortunate here that our paths crossed,” Picton says.

He isn’t alone. Buckingham’s influence – and as a result, the influence of the CIS – in Australian education policy debates has steadily increased under the Coalition. Phonics has been at the centre of that influence.

The debate surrounding the use of phonics in Australian classrooms has taken on a new, more urgent significance since the release last year of a government-commissioned report that recommended the introduction of a mandatory “check” on children’s phonics progress in their second year of schooling.

The report, published by an expert panel led by Buckingham, called for the “light touch” check to be a mirror of the model introduced in the UK in 2012.

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The check, which takes between five and seven minutes and is administered by a teacher, tests students’ ability to sound out a mix of 40 real and made up words.

While the education minister, Simon Birmingham, publicly backed the plan in September last year, it was variously embraced and rejected by divided sections of the education community.

In January the Victorian opposition leader, Matthew Guy, announced that if elected his government would make phonics instruction mandatory, with a check introduced in the first grade and Buckingham would be appointed to review Victoria’s curriculum.

Then, last week, the South Australian Labor government announced it would do the same after trialling the check in about 50 primary schools last year.

Announcing the decision the SA education minister, Susan Close, said the trial had shown the phonics check was “easy to carry out, children enjoy doing it and teachers find the results useful”.

The majority of kids with reading difficulties don’t have dyslexia, they just haven’t been taught properly Jennifer Buckingham

“The screening check is also an extra tool for teachers to use alongside their judgment and training to help children develop their reading skills,” she said.

On Twitter, Birmingham congratulated Close for making the phonics check “bipartisan policy”, a statement which raises an important question: why wasn’t phonics already a bipartisan policy, and what about it divides educators along ideological lines?

Much of it is philosophical; just the latest staging ground in a long-running reading war between those who say “explicit” instruction in phonics is essential to forming foundational links between letters and sounds, and those who argue it’s too mechanical and doesn’t teach comprehension.

“The reality is children come into school with different vocabulary levels and the gap only gets wider with each year of schooling,” Buckingham says.

“If you can nail down decoding in the first couple of years of school the range of abilities in the classroom narrows considerably, you can elevate the level of instruction for whole the class and there are less students in need of intervention.

“The reality is that the majority of kids with reading difficulties don’t have dyslexia, they just haven’t been taught properly.”

To suggest that just one approach to literacy [is sufficient] … is either naive or springs from a blinkered ideology Australian Education Union

Buckingham says the problem in Australia is that phonics is not being taught systematically, despite other states and territories deploying their own, similar forms of reading education.

In the Australian Capital Territory, for example, students learn “phonemic awareness” – being able to hear the sounds in words – through the Performance Indicators in Primary School, or Pips program.

But Yvette Berry, the ACT education minister, says Pips “assesses phonics in context rather than in isolation”.

“This methodology is based on evidence that phonics should be assessed and taught within meaningful texts – that meaning and grammar are essential for determining how phonics works,” she says.

The ACT is concerned that the proposed national phonics check will do little more to identify students who need support, she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Minister for education Simon Birmingham in the press gallery of Parliament House. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

The insistence on systematic instruction – and the introduction of the phonics check – is interpreted by some in education circles as being born of a suspicion about teacher abilities, and in Australia much of the opposition to the policy is being driven by Labor and the Australian Education Union.

When Birmingham announced he wanted to roll the check out nationally last year the Queensland education minister, Kate Jones, rejected it out of hand, arguing that the states already used phonics assessments and accusing Birmingham of “playing politics with young children”.



And in its submission to the government’s review of the allocation of Gonski 2.0 funding, the AEU said the phonics check was “an affront to teachers”.

“Firstly, the policy imposes yet another standardised test upon teachers, creating an extra demand on primary teacher’s already limited time whilst suggesting that they do not have the skills to identify and rectify literacy problems with their students,” the submission stated.

“Secondly, the proposal prescribes a specific pedagogical approach that teachers already practice when appropriate to do so.

The thing about phonics and learning to read and write is that it’s necessary but not sufficient Misty Adoniou

“To suggest that just one approach to literacy instruction and assessment is sufficient for primary teachers and students is either naive or springs from a blinkered ideology.”

But in Australia much of the phonics debate seems to be being driven by a misunderstanding of what’s happening on the other side of the fence.

Misty Adoniou, an associate professor of language and literacy from the University of Canberra has been a vocal critic of the phonics check plan, but she insists she’s not an opponent of phonics generally.

“The thing about phonics and learning to read and write is that it’s necessary but not sufficient,” she says.

“The model the phonics people seem to be working on is that phonics is a prerequisite to comprehension, when the rest of us who work in reading know that phonics and comprehension are corequisite, they work together and one informs the other.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Student working on reading skills using phonics. Photograph: Christina Kennedy/Alamy

And on the other side, Buckingham says that she doesn’t view phonics instruction as a “vaccine that will get rid of all reading issues”, but as something which, she believes, has the potential to bridge the knowledge gap in the early years of schooling.



And there’s the rub. Both sides of the divide on reading education in Australia seem to be opposing something the other says it isn’t proposing.

One reason for this, the former New South Wales education minister Adrian Piccoli suggests, might be down to politics.

“Who are these people who oppose phonics?” he says. “Maybe 20 years ago those people existed, but I don’t think there’s any dispute about the importance of it today.

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“What people are arguing against is the need to have this new test, and I think what’s happening is the pro-phonics people are trying to prosecute this old war to suggest that by opposing the check you’re arguing against the importance of phonics, and that’s not the case.”

Piccoli, who now heads the University of New South Wales’ new education research centre, the Gonski Institute, says he was lobbied to introduce a phonics check, but resisted because he was skeptical of the benefits of another, earlier standardised test in the education system.

“You can argue that it’s not the same as Naplan because it’s a one-on-one test but schools do have a paranoia about it, and rightly so, because what happens inevitably is it starts to influence what schools do and how they teach,” he says.



“I don’t think anyone is arguing that phonics isn’t an essential tool for teaching [but] I certainly wasn’t interested in going down that path [of a mandatory check] because I just don’t think we know enough about what current testing is doing to our schools.”

On that last point, there’s evidence that Piccoli may be right.

In 2015 the UK Department of Education commissioned a review of the first three years of the phonics program. It concluded that while results in the phonics test had improved, there was no evidence phonics instruction had increased overall literacy.

It stated that there were “no improvements in attainment or in progress that could be clearly attributed to the introduction of the check” and that progress had improved on the same trajectory before and after its introduction.

But other research in the UK found evidence that the program resulted in significant long-term benefits for poorer students and those from non-English speaking backgrounds.

A 2016 study from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics tracked the progress of more than 270,000 pupils in 150 local authorities that introduced the policy at different times.

It found children taught phonics had made better progress by the age of seven than those taught using other methods.

For Picton, the principal at Raymond Terrace Public School, the debate seems misplaced.

“I know that it works,” he says of systematic phonics instruction. “I’ve seen kids come to our school who otherwise would have fallen through the net, who were struggling, and we were able to identify them and fix that.”