Thursday, 31 August 2023

Education system

Matthew BACH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:52): (461) My adjournment matter is also for the Minister for Education, and it is on a slightly different matter. The action that I seek is for the minister to release in full the taxpayer-funded study into schools and their approach to teaching reading that was recently reported in the media. This study concerned six state primary schools. I know that the minister is incredibly excited about the recent NAPLAN results, despite the fact that they show that a quarter – fully a quarter – of Victorian students have dreadful reading skills.

David Davis: Standards have fallen.

Matthew BACH: Standards have fallen, as Mr Davis says. Indeed they have been falling for the last 20 years. The minister in the other place, every time she has the capacity to stand up and do a ministers statement, likes to quote from my opinion pieces. She enjoys reading my opinion pieces. I also enjoy reading my opinion pieces, but I read other people’s opinion pieces too, and I read a very interesting one two days ago in the Age newspaper, one of my favourites.

One Jo Rogers, a teacher herself, had an opinion piece in the Age two days ago, interestingly partly entitled ‘state government is creating a generation of kids who can’t read’. It would have been even better if it had been entitled ‘Kids who can’t read good’. Nonetheless, that was the title, and what Ms Rogers – who is something of an expert, unlike Ms Hutchins – spoke about is that it is not the fault of our kids that they have, for example, reading skills similar to those of most trained monkeys. That is a quote of mine that the minister wanted to recapitulate in the other place the other day. It is not the fault of our children or our amazing teachers – I used to be a teacher myself – but rather the fault of the state government and its faulty curriculum.

The state government continues to push what are called whole-word approaches to reading. In short, what you do is you give kids a book and you just ask them to guess words. For the last 20 years we have known that this approach has no evidence behind it. For the last 20 years we have known that phonics is the evidence-based approach to reading, and that is what Ms Rogers had to say. Indeed she picked up the minister, as I have done, for the victory lap that she has been doing recently regarding our dreadful NAPLAN results. It is interesting that the minister is suppressing this important report, a report into fabulous state primary schools that say no to the government’s faulty approach to reading and instead embrace phonics. What this report shows, it is reported, is that schools who embrace phonics, surprisingly, do far better. The kids at these schools do far better.

Of course I am not surprised that the minister has suppressed this report. She should release it. She should release it so that best practice can be shared right across our state, so that more teachers can finally learn something that they never learned going through our university system, and that is the skills that they are up to learning absolutely to help our children improve, because as Ms Rogers said, the state government curriculum is creating a generation of kids who cannot read.