Learning to read is one of the building blocks of life and yet there are concerns some children including here in Canberra are being left behind. Advocates say it's creating a "lottery" for parents with the schools that are teaching students to sound out words seeing literacy standards lift.
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00:00 It's almost dinner time at the Bogart house and that means homework.
00:07 12-year-old Zoe is a thriving student now, but in her younger years she struggled to
00:12 learn to read.
00:13 It was a little bit frustrating for me because no one was telling me how to do it or no one
00:19 was helping me understand what I was reading.
00:23 By year three Zoe was three years behind.
00:26 I did feel quite let down, I put my trust into the teachers and into the public system
00:32 and I've literally got no result.
00:35 Noni found Zoe a tutor and moved her to a Canberra Catholic school.
00:39 There she was explicitly taught to sound out words instead of memorising or guessing them.
00:45 Zoe caught up within two years.
00:47 There's many what I would call instructional casualties which are kids that are failing
00:52 to learn to read, not because they can't but because they're not taught well enough.
00:57 More and more schools are moving to what's called structured explicit literacy where
01:02 children are taught letters and sounds in a particular order so they can decode unfamiliar
01:07 words.
01:08 Instead of using predictable readers which have been removed from the national curriculum
01:13 it uses decodable readers.
01:16 Decodable readers promote guessing and there's lots of long words and tricky sounds.
01:24 A decodable reader promotes decoding and it has a restricted amount of letters and sounds
01:32 which the child has been practising.
01:34 We know that children who are effective readers early on are the ones who have acquired those
01:41 automatic decoding skills.
01:44 Professor Pamela Snow says there is huge variation in what schools are doing across the country.
01:50 Parents don't know that they're signing up for a lottery when they enrol their child
01:55 at this school rather than that school.
01:58 E as in peace.
02:01 South Australian public schools started explicitly teaching phonics five years ago.
02:06 With the help of literacy coaches the state's NAPLAN reading and phonics check results have
02:11 been steadily improving, especially among children from poorer backgrounds.
02:16 When we can see those results changing that's always really good for teachers to be able
02:20 to go oh actually what you're telling me and what we're trying and doing here is actually
02:23 working for me and my students.
02:25 The big thing that I'm seeing in the children is confidence.
02:28 So when they come into our phonics lessons because they're structured, they're explicit,
02:33 they have a routine and the kids know what to expect.
02:36 New South Wales and WA public schools also teach this way, while Tasmania and now Queensland
02:42 are committed to making a state-wide switch.
02:45 But the phonics first approach still has its critics.
02:48 I believe that a balanced approach works best because it allows the teacher to encompass
02:56 using a whole range of different strategies to meet the needs of the individual learner.
03:02 For Noni there's no question what works best.
03:05 Her son Jagger was explicitly taught phonics from the beginning.
03:09 He's already nearly at a year two level in reading from doing his decodable readers.
03:14 Cracking the code for a fundamental skill for life.
03:17 [BLANK_AUDIO]