Phonics test for year-one kids offers lots of benefits and no downside

Many people in education circles are keen for the impending Gonski 2.0 report. But their eagerness was far outweighed by educators’ fervour to see the results of South Australia’s trial of the contentious phonics check. The just-released evaluation confirms what the check’s advocates have been arguing: children need it and teachers like it.

The reaction of the various state and territory ministers to the idea of a year-one phonics check, initially proposed by federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham in 2016, has been mixed – partly because of widespread misinformation about the design and the purpose of the check and partly because of the vagaries of education politics.

The only state that has officially adopted it as policy is South Australia, with Victoria following suit if a Liberal government is elected later this year. Despite the importance of the South Australian trial’s findings, the communique issued from the recent COAG Education Council meeting does not list it as an agenda item.

Phonics teaches children how to “sound out” words using their knowledge of how letters of the alphabet represent the sounds they hear in spoken language. It’s widely used. The question is, how effectively? A year-one phonics check would make sure that children have this essential skill so they can make good progress in learning to read. Critics say teachers are already teaching and assessing phonics well and the check is unnecessary.

Parlous result

The South Australian trial in 56 public schools – designed to indicate how children would respond to and perform on the assessment, and whether it was useful to teachers and school leaders – resulted in bad (but unsurprising) news that students did not score well.

In England – where the phonics check has been in place since 2012 – 81 per cent of Year 1 children achieved a score of 32 or more out of 40 last year. In the South Australian trial, just 17 per cent of Year 1 children achieved that level. This is a parlous result and points to the clear need for the check to be implemented across Australia if we are to arrest the current slide in literacy. That teachers in the trial did not expect such low scores clearly supports concerns that even among schools that believe they teach phonics, many are not doing it very well.

There are some differences between South Australian and England in the way the check was administered, but much more important is the fact that synthetic phonics (a particular technique) instruction is mandatory in the first two years of school in England, with clear instructional and content criteria. Teachers in the South Australian trial said they mostly, or always, use synthetic phonics; but no additional information was sought to verify this.

But what about the check’s alleged burden on teachers and anxiety levels for students?

Pile of evidence

Presumably they’ll be greatly relieved at the news that teachers and school leaders in the trial were overwhelmingly positive about the implementation of the phonics check and the information it provided about students’ phonics skills. As for the students themselves, there was not one report of a child being stressed or anxious about the check. The report’s statement that “Teachers universally commented that all students ‘loved’ the one-to-one time with the teacher doing the PSC” is a resounding endorsement.

This means, as recommended in the expert panel report to the Australian government last year, if teaching and learning are to improve quickly, the phonics check must be accompanied by evidence-based professional learning for teachers in how to interpret the results of the check and how to respond. In the long term, though, universities must better prepare teachers to teach reading, including phonics.

The SA trial sits atop a large pile of evidence showing that poor phonics instruction is a contributor to the large number of children who struggle to achieve even basic levels of reading ability. The year-one phonics check is an efficient way to identify the extent and the nature of the problem.

Other states and territories have only two defensible options. They can ignore detractors, accept the evidence, and agree to implement the year-one phonics check; or run a trial and see the evidence for themselves. The risk is zero and the benefits are huge.

Dr Jennifer Buckingham is a senior research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and a Council member of Learning Difficulties Australia.