NSW government gets it right on reading instruction

The best way to improve the quality of school education is to ensure that there is a good, if not great, teacher in every classroom every day. This is achieved by selecting the best candidates and educating them well. It sounds like an obvious strategy, but submissions to the federal government's review of teacher education argue that this is not par for the course in teacher education.

There is a growing consensus that entry standards for teacher education courses at university are often too low and must be elevated, based on consistent evidence that teacher quality is highly correlated with the teacher's own academic ability. But there is also the question of how well teacher education courses prepare prospective teachers for the classroom.

One of the most important responsibilities of primary school teachers, in particular, is to teach children to read. Obviously the home literacy environment provided by parents also plays a role, but the first two years of school are critical in a child's reading development.

The best evidence from methodologically rigorous, well-designed studies on literacy development shows that early reading instruction must have five key elements: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Research also shows that explicit and systematic instruction is more effective than teaching strategies that assume children will acquire these skills naturally, just by memorising words and being read to. Unfortunately, not all primary teacher education courses provide sufficient training and education on the essential elements of reading or the most effective pedagogies to teach them.

Phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, in which children learn that speech and language is made up of distinct sounds, and that these sounds correspond with the print on the page, are often the least well understood by teachers and therefore the least well taught. It is very difficult for teachers to teach what they do not know.

The NSW government has acknowledged that this is a problem and has moved to ensure that all teachers have the knowledge and skills to teach phonics effectively, by pushing universities to include phonics in teacher education courses and providing professional development to teachers. This is a landmark policy and, if implemented well, one which has the potential to have a significant impact on literacy achievement.

Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.