Tuesday, 20 February 2024

Literacy education

Renee HEATH (Eastern Victoria) (18:55): (708) My adjournment is for the Minister for Education, and the action that I seek is for the minister to release the findings of the buried La Trobe University study into evidence-based literacy approaches in Victorian schools. Victoria’s failing literacy outcomes were once again highlighted with the release of Grattan Institute’s report The Reading Guarantee last week. The report finds that a staggering one in four Victorian schoolchildren are unable to read properly. In regional and rural areas this number rises to half. Representing an electorate that takes in many regional and rural communities, I find this tragic and completely unacceptable.

Unsurprisingly, the report puts these poor results down to a confusing mix of failed literacy theories promoted by the Victorian Department of Education and a lack of guidance for schools. While other Australian states are now adopting a national phonics-based approach to reading and writing, the Victorian government persists with ineffective teaching theories that have been thoroughly discredited throughout the US, the UK and Australia. Yet a handful of Victorian schools have courageously turned the tide on literacy underperformance. Through their own initiative, six schools adopted a structured phonics-based approach called the science of reading and completely transformed their results. The Andrews government commissioned La Trobe University to undertake a study into these schools. Shockingly, the findings of this study were suppressed by the Department of Education. It seems that the success of these schools has inadvertently highlighted the failure of this government. As a result, powerful information that could reform literacy teaching and change the school experience for tens of thousands of struggling students remains buried.

With Victoria’s disappointing Programme for International Student Assessment and NAPLAN results in 2023 and the Grattan report this year, it has become abundantly clear that we are facing a literacy crisis in this state, so I am calling on the Minister for Education to make the findings of this taxpayer-funded report available so that we can learn from these schools and implement the science-based literacy methods to improve outcomes for all Victorian students.