Motions

Phonics Checks

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (12:24): I move:

That this house notes the results of the year 1 phonics check this year and commends all of the educators, support staff, parents and children for the work they have done this year in their reading and learning.

It is with great pleasure that I rise to move the motion standing in my name. This is a motion that relates to the year 1 phonics check and the application of evidence-based measures to support our youngest learners in school in the development of their literacy capabilities.

Learning to read is one of the most foundational aspects of all education. It is not the only aspect of education: there is ensuring that our children's developmental needs are considered, ensuring our children are attending school and ensuring that children have access to a broad range of curriculum that will energise their interests, excite them and give them opportunities to learn, to flourish, to thrive and to find pathways to meaningful life outcomes. We want our education system to enable every young South Australian to be their best self and to fulfil their potential.

But, unless you effectively teach children, unless we effectively teach our children to read, all those other aspects of their education are either diminished or rendered incapable, certainly incapable of being fulfilled to their potential. Unfortunately, we have understanding in South Australia that this most prosperous of jurisdictions, by world and historical comparisons, is a jurisdiction where certainly there was a period when we were not putting our most effective resources towards the important goal of teaching our children and young people to read. It is no one specific person's fault. We each of us, as we go about our business—whether as politicians or teachers or any other aspect of society—have an opportunity every day to learn how to do things better, to use the evidence that we are given to best apply ourselves to whatever trade we are seeking to accomplish.

Unfortunately, when it came to teaching kids to read, for 20 or 30 years, or maybe even 40 years, the prevailing wisdom in academia was that a whole-language approach to the teaching of reading was more effective than looking at the evidence. What was seen as old-fashioned in the 1960s and 1970s, and indeed seen as ancient history in the 1980s and 1990s in our universities, was the teaching of phonics to children to be able to decode language and to be able to read the words in front of them, even if they were words that they had not previously encountered or even if they were words that were not accompanied by a picture that might give a clue or a cue as to how that word should be pronounced. That was the prevailing wisdom, and unfortunately we have had a couple of generations of people going through universities who were not given the best evidence base.

When I was appointed shadow minister for education in 2016, I was approached by a number of people. I sought a significant number of stakeholders' time as to how we could best help our children to get better outcomes. In that year, in 2016, our NAPLAN results—and I recognise NAPLAN is not the be-all and end-all; it is a snapshot in time, but it is a very useful snapshot in understanding how a system goes—had South Australia's students drifting backwards from the pack.

There are always reasons why a child might not prosper or might not thrive; but year on year in NAPLAN assessments, when every jurisdiction in Australia is undertaking the same test and you see South Australia's results diminishing year on year—and diminishing compared to other states year on year, as we were through the period from when I entered parliament in 2010 up until 2016 when I became shadow minister for education—you must ask yourself the question: why is this the case? Are we doing the best for our children, such as they deserve? The answer, very simply, was no, we were not. We were failing our children by failing to adopt the most effective, evidence-based techniques to teach them to read.

South Australian students consequently, I think it was in 2016, were last or second last in 16 out of the 20 categories in which NAPLAN was tested. We were behind Tasmania in a lot of these categories of all the states. I do not count the territories because of the small numbers that we are talking about there. South Australia was not doing well enough.

There is the Code Read Dyslexia Network, and there are people like Sandra Marshall from Dyslexia SA and people from SPELD, an outstanding organisation that still continues to this day since their institution some 40 or 50 years ago. SPELD is an organisation that advocates and also offers interventions, and supports government in its work for children with specific learning difficulties.

There were people at that time like Cathie Wilson, who was a former principal at Stradbroke Primary School in my local area and a chair of SPELD and Sandy Russo, a senior figure in SPELD at the time, who is now a learning intervention coach and tutor in my local area in Rostrevor. Stakeholders such as these, but also a number of others, highlighted the need for us to ensure that there was a rigorous and consistent approach to the use of phonics across our schools in South Australia, because unless we did that, then we were failing our children.

But they also consistently highlighted to me that the prevailing wisdom and the academic research was increasingly showing that the science of learning, the science of reading and evidence-based explicit instruction in the early years, when it came to particularly aspects of teaching children to read using approaches like synthetic phonics, was the most effective way to teach all children to read, especially for those with dyslexia and other learning difficulties.

Despite that, many of the teachers who had come through had never been effectively trained in it. Schools were often purchasing programs—and some of them very good programs—but unless taught effectively and rigorously were not having the desired impacts on students. I heard from SPELD that they were regularly called into schools to help them try to pick up their reading instruction and they might have been using a phonics-based program but not using it well and they were finding that they had to teach the teachers how to use the programs.

Meanwhile, in the UK we had a situation with the English government, the UK government, bearing in mind that Westminster has specific responsibility for England's schooling system, not the devolved Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland systems. In England, one of the aspects that was promoted to me by SPELD and by Dyslexia SA was this year 1 phonics check. A year 1 phonics check was a marker that would help particularly students, teachers in their classroom activity, help principals, leaders and indeed the teachers themselves to understand where a child was placed at in their phonics and would also be a signpost for systems, policymakers and those who are interested observers, journalists and the like, such as the good folk we have in our South Australian press corps.

They were signposts into how systems were going in teaching our youngest learners, because by the time a student's year 3 NAPLAN results come about, if they are identifying that a student is falling short in reading, the student is already eight years old and has already been at school for certainly 2½ years and in many cases 3½ years. Indeed, that is quite a late time to be starting an intervention that could be readily identified much earlier.

In the UK, in England when they started this phonics check, in the first year of results the results were very poor and that acted as a signpost for the system to improve their results. Indeed, over the subsequent decade those results have improved and what followed consequently—and not just as a result of phonics becoming the dominant methodology for teaching little children to read, but also through a rigorous evidence-based approach to the rest of the curricula and to the rest of teaching across English schools—was the international rankings, which again are a moment in time, a snapshot, but a very useful one, saw England's education system, having diminished from the top five and top 10 across reading and math some 20 years ago into the 20s and the 30s, had turned around. After 10 years of phonics, and as it is now, they are now back in the top five and back in the top 10 according to those measures.

I thought it was really important we have that opportunity in South Australia and we developed a suite of measures—we called it our Literacy Guarantee suite of measures—which we announced and took to the 2018 election. Steven Marshall had an ambition for South Australia to have the best schools in Australia. As I said many times as minister, we wanted every child in every classroom, no matter what suburb or town or city they lived in in South Australia, to have the best opportunity to thrive, to succeed in life and to fulfil their potential. Getting the basics right in those early years is absolutely critical.

It included literacy coaches, who indeed through that Literacy Guarantee Unit have been providing direct coaching to teachers in schools, particularly where there is a deficit. It included school holiday programs, opportunities for teachers to upgrade their own professional development. It included the year 1 phonics check, and I was very pleased to again thank Nick Gibb when I spoke to him at a Centre for Independent Studies conference a few weeks ago when he was visiting Australia. I thanked him for the way the UK government had provided their check free of charge to South Australia to be able to adapt and use for our local needs. Indeed, it also included a range of other metrics.

One of the things the education department did that worked really well was providing resources to schools identifying best practice and helping those principals and year 1 teachers—and even better when you had a whole-school approach with buy-in from all of the teachers—enabling them to upgrade the way in which they were doing their work.

When we first implemented this, there was a trial that was conducted in 2017 at 50 schools. I have previously commended, and will again, the Deputy Premier, the former Minister for Education, for implementing that trial. It was very complementary and enabled us to move more quickly on our policy. It probably improved the speed by six months to 12 months in how we were able to then roll it out, because the findings of that trial, through some Flinders University research by Anne Bayetto amongst others, were able to identify a couple of adjustments to the English check that worked well for South Australian standards.

That trial was then able to be adapted into a full rollout, which we committed to in May 2017. I will also acknowledge that Labor committed two days before the 2018 election to doing the same. For what it is worth, James Sadler and the Xenophon party that were running at that time made that same commitment in between, so we have full bipartisan support for this approach now in South Australia. That approach over the last six years has helped back up the work of principals in schools, who have helped get teachers on board.

When we had the first check in 2018 in all schools, it is fair to say that a significant number of our teachers were sceptical. The union was sceptical. A large number of people of course had been plying their trade as they were taught in university, and they believed themselves to be doing the very best possible job. It is completely understandable they would feel that way. Many were surprised to discover a lower proportion of their students meeting the standard than they had expected. Across South Australia, only 43 per cent of our year 1 students met that standard in the first years—45 per cent in the metropolitan area, 36 per cent in the country, only 18 per cent in low SES communities, 21 per cent in Aboriginal communities and 14 per cent for students with a disability.

It was a wake-up call for them. Many responded in a way that made me so proud to be Minister for Education at the time: they looked for ways that they could do better. They took on board the training that was being offered. What we have been seeing since is these whole-school approaches, not just the phonics check and the interventions that it therefore allowed but also the way that whole schools across South Australia have changed their approach to the teaching of literacy.

Over subsequent years, we had a 9 per cent improvement in the first year and another 11 per cent in the second year. We have gone, over the six years of the checks up to last year, from 43 per cent to 71 per cent of our students achieving the benchmark. Even more impressive is the improvement in low-SES communities, from 18 per cent to 47 per cent. Aboriginal communities have improved from 21 per cent to 44 per cent, and students with a disability have improved from 14 per cent to 45 per cent.

What that demonstrates is that the students who are benefiting the most are actually the ones whose need was the most acute, and that benefit is something of which we can be proud. There is always more work to do. It cannot be assumed that, because the year 1 phonics check and the work that has been done to improve the teaching of reading for our year 1s has improved, that is the end of the story.

The government has recently introduced a numeracy check. It is a logical next step to do so, and I look forward to getting a briefing on how that numeracy check is working and whether it is exactly the right model, but it was always going to be the logical next step. The UK government followed its phonics check with a times tables check. The South Australian government has followed the phonics check with a numeracy check, and we will work with the government in a bipartisan way to fashion the best possible future way forward for that, I am sure.

It is also worth noting, though, that there are a range of challenges that the system confronts. Our NAPLAN results, having had that low point in 2016, were the fastest improving in the nation between 2017 and 2022. We overtook Tasmania, we overtook Queensland and we were catching up to Western Australia in everything other than year 9, where they put significant stakes on their NAPLAN tests.

We plateaued, I think it is fair to say, this year. It will be really interesting to see what the 2024 phonics check shows. Most of all, I want to congratulate all of the educators, the support staff, the parents and the children on the work they have done in their reading and learning this year. I am sure those phonics checks will be good, and I look forward to seeing the work that these young people and their educators do in the months and years ahead, because with a great education they can achieve anything.

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills) (12:39): I rise to support this motion and acknowledge the words of the shadow minister. I am pleased to provide some comments of my own around both the importance of the phonics check to South Australian students over a number of years now and the results we have seen from that. I am sure it will greatly excite the member for Morialta that I have this year's data as well, which I will share with this place.

Perhaps there are a few things I could say before I do that about the importance of phonics. I agree with a lot of what the member for Morialta just said, particularly around what felt at the time like an endless debate we were in here in South Australia and elsewhere in Australia around whether or not phonics was something that was worthwhile of introduction and use in the South Australian context. We got past that debate, thankfully, when the then education minister did the trial and the member for Morialta continued the rollout in his time, to give them both credit for the work they did there.

It is remarkable to think there are still jurisdictions in this country of ours all those years later which, despite the great results we have seen from phonics (the data does not lie—it is clear around what the benefit has been), are still arguing about whether or not having phonics is something they should or should not do. I use this opportunity to suggest to those jurisdictions that they have a very close look at the South Australian experience with phonics and the results we have seen from that.

I will speak in a bit more detail soon around our new numeracy check that I announced just last week with the member for Newland at the Modbury South Primary School. Both those things should be taken as very strong evidence of how thoroughly we believe in the benefit of phonics and what it has done for South Australian students since the trial started in 2017 and the full rollout in 2018, but also that we are adopting the same kind of model in many respects for a year 1 numeracy check so that we can identify whether there are issues early in the piece with what is quite a simple but effective check or test or assessment—whatever you would like to call it. Then if that does identify some issues, that it is not at the expected standard mathematically or that it is vulnerable—however you want to describe it—then we add in that extra support really early in the piece.

What we definitely know, and what is certainly not up for debate in any state, territory in Australia or in any other country, is that the longer you leave it to address that stuff the harder it gets to fix it. The thing that has stuck with me is conversations I have had with high school principals but also adult community education providers around the incredible lengths some young adults will go to to hide the fact that they are illiterate or innumerate, and some can do that very well. But they often get to a point where it needs to be addressed. They might be in their early 20s and the task of addressing the failures of the years prior is an exponentially harder job than it would be had we put in the resources for that young person when they were in junior primary school and at the point at which we should have identified that they were struggling with their literacy or numeracy. That is the real benefit of phonics, in my mind.

I have had my own three daughters all do the year 1 phonics check, so I got to see up close how that worked, and I had discussions with them and their teachers around the benefit of that. It certainly has my very strong endorsement as the current minister in South Australia. We have certainly continued that work. For instance, we have continued the role of the Literacy Guarantee Unit that the former government put in place. We have kept that because we think it is important.

The new South Australian Curriculum has a really strong focus—it is something that the chief executive, Martin Westwell, and I have focused on a lot and discussed a lot and something I was able to touch upon at the Premier's Reading Challenge reception just last week—on inspiring kids to find a love of reading. Of course, that is in some respects connected to, but different from, phonics and the ability to read and be literate, but it also fosters in young people an actual love of reading so that when they have time available to them they might actually choose to pick up a book instead of doing something else. That is a really strong feature of the new South Australian adapted curriculum.

We have continued the annual Literacy Summit. It will be back in person next year. We have been doing a rotation of that with the Numeracy Summit because we need to have a focus on both of those things. We think the summit is a good thing and that is why we have continued it, but our focus needs to be on both literacy and numeracy and for that reason we have added both and are rotating them. I can update the house today to say that the 2025 in-person Literacy Summit will have a focus on the development of oral language and its importance to all the other aspects of literacy, including reading.

As I said before, I was at the Premier's Reading Challenge recently. That still goes strong after many years of operation. I would imagine that for members in this place, their own kids may have been involved. I know the member for King's and the member for Davenport's children have been involved in the Premier's Reading Challenge. It is important. It is an added tool in the toolkit for parents and educators to get kids to pick up a book or find a series of books that they might like.

That is what we have done with our kids; I think it is Wolf Girl in our house at the moment. From what I can see, there are about 500 of those in the series, but the fact that our daughters have found them interesting and have sequels to read after it is a really fantastic thing because they look forward to finishing the book and getting onto the next one, and of course the Premier's Reading Challenge was the way they were introduced to that. I think after all the years of that challenge it maintains its importance.

We have updated reception to year 2 phonics and spelling scope and sequence resources. The resources include progress monitoring tools, card decks to support instruction, and independent tasks to support students to apply their knowledge and skills. It is important that, despite the success of phonics over a number of years now, we continue to refresh the resources to make sure that they are as good as they possibly can be.

I might just now move on to the results for this year. I know everyone is waiting with bated breath. Again, we have seen 70 per cent of all students who actively participated in the check scoring at or above the expected achievement score, on par with 2023. In 2018—I think the member for Morialta used this data as well—43 per cent of year 1 students were able to correctly decode 28 words or more. The 2024 results represent an improvement of 27 percentage points since back then in 2018. This is a really significant improvement and 11,884 year 1 students actively took part, which is great.

I might quickly refer back to the numeracy check, because the data is eerily similar in terms of what I just spoke about in the check of 2018 with 43 per cent of year 1 students able to correctly decode 28 words or more. In the survey of sorts of, I think, more than 5,000 students that was conducted when Susan Close, the member for Port Adelaide, was minister, from memory it found that 58 per cent of those who did the assessment were not meeting the expected standard.

The almost identical survey that we did that led to the announcement of the numeracy check, 7,000 students across 95 schools, found that when it came to maths 60 per cent were not meeting the expected standard. Again, we find ourselves in similar territory where once we actually do the hard work of digging down—instead of a kind of vague 'finger in the air' sense of where things are in the system—we see some actual hard, solid data around where individual kids are at. I might say that to me has always been the benefit of NAPLAN, which is sometimes glossed over, and that is that it is a real asset to parents as well as the school in terms of getting an individualised idea of where their child might be at.

To finish off, the results are strong again. It is something that we are absolutely committed to maintaining, refreshing and keeping relevant, but it has also really informed last week's announcement about introducing a numeracy check for all year 1 students from the start of the 2026 school year.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (12:49): I thank the minister for his comments and agree with many of his sentiments. I thank the minister for updating the house as to the 2024 phonics check results. With, unfortunately, 70 per cent of students at the mark, I think we can keep improving. Last year it was 71 per cent, so it is broadly the same—there is a statistical glimmer of difference—but what we would hope to see is continued improvement because if our advantaged schools are at 80 per cent, there is no reason they cannot be at 90 per cent or 95 per cent.

There are schools with socio-economic disadvantage in this state that are achieving 80 per cent, 85 per cent, 90 per cent. I remember visiting places like Noarlunga Downs, Woodville Gardens or Salisbury North, schools where the staff were so proud of their achievements, as they had improved from it might have been 20 per cent, 30 per cent, 40 per cent in the first year, to within a few years being above 60 per cent, 70 per cent, 80 per cent. Seventy per cent of our year 1 students being at the mark is much better than we were when we embarked upon this bipartisan journey. It cannot be the end point that we find acceptable.

The minister detailed some of the work that continues. I acknowledge that the government has kept some of the policy interventions we put in place, the Literacy Guarantee coaches and the literacy day. A lot of those measures and the resources have been important and continue to be important. I think perhaps one of the signposts that the results the minister just outlined suggests that it is not an appropriate time to declare mission accomplished on rigorously improving all of our schools' approaches to early years literacy. There is clearly opportunity for further improvement.

The tyranny of low expectations that might be visited upon students who are in schools that have not yet achieved the bar should be countered with the optimism and the courage to consider that there are schools that have seen dramatic improvement from numbers in the teens or the 20s, through to the 70s, 80s and potentially even 90s. It is an opportunity for the minister in the work that he does over the next year and a half—until obviously he is replaced by a future Liberal minister—to burnish his reputation with that continued improvement.

Obviously these checks are relevant for our public schools and our non-government schools, who have the checks made available to them. Some of them use them and some of them do not. We are able to talk about the public system when we talk about these checks. The opportunity is there to reinforce and reinvigorate the value of this work.

I think that it is not for lack of the resources being available in this case. I think that the minister and the chief executive have ensured that the resources remain available, and I commend them for that. I think it is a matter of focus, and there is an opportunity for some schools potentially to have a look at their results and think to themselves: 'Is this something that we can do better? Is this an opportunity for us to reach out to the Literacy Guarantee Unit and see how they can help us improve our work? Are there things that we can be doing differently?'

I know it has been an extraordinarily complex time for schools. The pandemic presented its own challenges, but in that 2022 school year when the department was dealing with teachers or students being sick, there were changing regulations, as is natural as we were coming out of the pandemic and resuming normal life, in many ways as our community resumed a level of normality that they had been yearning for for two years, our schools went from being the most stable places in our community to some of the most destabilised in that 2022 school year. There were teachers and students being sick, being out of school, being in school.

There are many factors that have resulted in a teacher shortage that we are now dealing with, but we have hundreds of teaching students who are working in our schools as well, so I recognise that there are many causes for disruption. These phonics checks are welcome, these phonics check results are to be welcomed. It is not a significant deterioration: it is 1 per cent. I do not want to overstate it by any means.

It is a glad piece of news that we are still above 70 per cent, but it is also an excellent opportunity to re-energise our focus on our children's literacy, because very few things, if any, are more important in enabling them to fully grasp and succeed in their curriculum. Once again, thank you to the minister and to all of the educators, families and especially the students for the work they have done in their learning this year.

Motion carried.