ACT teachers put poor literacy results in public schools down to 'socioeconomic status'

The ACT teachers union has taken the “strongest stand” against a report showing one in three 15-year-old students in the ACT isn’t meeting the reading benchmark. The union points to socioeconomic status rather than any intrinsic issue with the teaching.

The new Raising the Grade report by Equity Economics (and funded by the Snow Foundation) found that the percentage of ACT students below the Australian proficient standard for reading, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), is the worst in 20 years.

“The percentage of low performers in the ACT has increased from 8 per cent in 2000 to 13 per cent in 2018,” it reads.

Results in many areas of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) are equally dire.

“Almost one in five Year 9 students in the ACT are at or below NAPLAN National Minimum Standards for reading, which means they are operating at a Year 6 level.”

The report acknowledged dropping literacy levels are not unique to the ACT, but the public education system here has the “worst relationship between socioeconomic status and performance of all jurisdictions except the Northern Territory”.

Or, in the words of report co-author Jessica Del Rio: “There are a lot of very advantaged kids [in Canberra] who aren’t reaching their potential, and there’s an even higher proportion of disadvantaged kids who aren’t reaching their potential.”

The end result is “basically a lottery whether your child will get to the end of school and have reached proficiency benchmarks for reading”.

A list of recommendations to the ACT Government traces the problem back to tertiary education, where graduate teachers leave “underprepared to teach children how to read”. Once in school, they’re then “not receiving appropriate professional development” on the best-practice phonetic method and, instead, students are effectively being taught to guess words.

In response to the report, the ACT Education Directorate said it was “reviewing the details” but also backed its approach to teaching.

“The ACT public school system provides a systematic, evidence-based approach to early literacy instruction through the 10 Essential Instructional Practices in Literacy, based on the research of Professor Nell K Duke,” a spokesperson said.

“This instruction includes the explicit teaching of phonological awareness and letter-sound relationships in the early years.”

The ACT Branch of the Australian Education Union (AEU ACT) has now joined in and taken the “strongest stand” against suggestions teachers “are so incapable they should read from a script to deliver a curriculum”.

“Whenever we engage in a public debate about the efficacy of particular teaching practices, we are ignoring the thing that has the most impact on learning: a student’s socioeconomic status,” branch president Angela Burroughs said.

“It’s not hard to instinctively understand that if a child comes to school hungry, or from a family experiencing insecure housing or not being able to meet basic health needs, then that child is going to have trouble learning.”

She said teachers frequently work far beyond their paid hours each week to match the curriculum to each student’s needs.

“They do this because they are education experts and because they care.”

The ACT is among the “most advantaged” areas in Australia, according to ABS data, with an average socioeconomic status in the highest quintile. But the Equity Economics report points to government schools in South Australia – who are dealing with a lower socioeconomic status but returning better results in education – as proof teaching is the issue.

In 2018, South Australia became the first jurisdiction in Australia to introduce the Year 1 Phonics Check, where each student is quizzed on their abilities to sound out up to 40 unknown words.

“In 2018, only 43 per cent of Year 1 students met the Phonics Check benchmark,” the report cites.

“By 2022, this number had increased to 68 per cent of all students with improvements seen across all equity groups.”

Closer to home, a new approach to teaching reversed a downward trajectory in the 56 Catholic schools across the ACT and NSW.

In 2019, 42 per cent of Catholic schools and 54 per cent of government schools were underperforming, but two years into the new ‘Catalyst’ curriculum, only 4 per cent of Catholic schools were underperforming compared to 60 per cent of government schools.

However, it’s not all bad for the ACT schools.

Last year, the average ACT NAPLAN scores were significantly above the national average for reading in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. And the ACT is still the highest-performing Australian jurisdiction (and ranks alongside England) in literacy on an international scale.

But the report still expects better results from an area with such a high socioeconomic status compared to other regions in Australia.

“The ACT has an opportunity to lead the nation in providing gold standard evidence-based classroom practices to lift literacy rates and to dismantle the predictability of achievement by socioeconomic status,” report co-author Ms Del Rio said.