Minister backs national literacy and numeracy checks for year 1 students
Students as young as five could be tested on their literacy and numeracy as part of plan to identify struggling year 1 students, as recommended by an expert report to government.
The “light touch” check would consist of a one-on-one interview between a child and their regular teacher focusing on phonics and an as-yet undeveloped numeracy test.
The education minister, Simon Birmingham, has strongly backed the check, saying it would “ensure students don’t slip through the cracks” and it would be “great” if the national test were in place by 2019.
Birmingham released a report by an expert advisory panel on Monday, led by Jennifer Buckingham, which recommends a national literacy and numeracy check for year 1 students.
The report found that by the time students reach year 3, when the first Naplan standardised tests are conducted, it is “difficult, expensive and inefficient to remediate gaps in literacy and numeracy skills”.
“We found that there is no systematic early assessment of the essential core early reading and numeracy skills identified,” Buckingham said.
The panel recommended a “light touch” year 1 screening assessment of literacy, focusing on phonics (sounding out words) and numeracy – with an emphasis on number sense, position and location skills.
The check would be conducted with a teacher familiar with the student and would occur in the middle of year 1, the second year of schooling (after kindergarten).
Queensland’s education minister, Kate Jones, immediately rejected the proposal.
“No parent wants more exams for their children,” she said. “Once again the Turnbull government are trying to dictate to states how to run schools.”
Jones said at a meeting of education ministers in Adelaide last week Birmingham failed to get any support for the new test, AAP reported.
The report said that there was “strong evidence” that phonics education is an “essential component” of learning to read but noted it is “still a contentious area in literacy education” despite the large volume of evidence.
The panel adopted the English model of a compulsory phonics screening check that has been mandatory since 2012 but noted that “no similar brief systemic tools” existed for numeracy, requiring a new test to be developed.
The report found that phonics tests in state and territory government schools were “relatively weak and highly variable” and the existing tests “do not provide sufficient information about students’ phonics knowledge to inform teaching practices or policy”.
The panel recommended that results of the check should be shared with parents and carers, and given to researchers for analysis.
School-level data “should not be published or disseminated in any way that makes schools, teachers or children identifiable”, it said, effectively ruling out MySchool-style league tables of Naplan results.
“Schools in which significant proportions of children do not reach criterion on these measures should be offered appropriately tailored supports, at teacher and student levels.”
Birmingham told ABC AM that state and territory education ministers were provided the report last week and governments would consider a trial of phonics testing in South Australia before adopting the national test.
David Gonski is conducting a review of Australian schooling, to report by the end of 2017, and some states have complained they will have little leverage to control over reform principles adopted after that process.
Birmingham said additional resources to help struggling students were already being provided, pointing to the government’s extra $23bn to schools through its Gonski 2.0 education package.
The education minister said he “hoped” it wouldn’t be necessary to tie extra funding to states adopting the test, but did not rule it out.
Birmingham told the ABC News Breakfast he would not buy into ideological debates pitting phonics against the “whole language” approach to reading.
“Phonics instruction should be occurring in school, but it’s not the only part of literacy that children need to understand and develop,” he said.
Birmingham described it as “one part of the instruction tool kit” but said “we need to deploy other critical parts of instruction too”.
Last week the Nick Xenophon Team signalled its opposition to the government’s higher education bill which includes $2.8bn in cuts and fee rises.
Birmingham told ABC AM he was not looking at using his ministerial powers to enact a funding freeze because the government still wanted to legislate the original package.
The bill would impose a two-year 2.5% efficiency dividend on universities, lower the Help debt repayment threshold to $42,000 and increase fees by a cumulative total of 7.5% by 2021.