When a small Victorian primary school changed its approach to teaching students how to read, success was unexpectedly swift. As Education Matters reported in mid-2024, its story is now part of a national report on how to give every child the best chance of learning this foundational skill.
Some years ago, Churchill Primary school followed a whole-language approach to teaching reading in its daily one-hour reading class. Classes focused on reading strategies – such as three-cueing or visualising while reading – and students were given a lot of independent reading time, even when they could not yet read. While struggling students completed Reading Recovery intervention five times a week, this did not connect to what happened in class.
With so much independent reading time, students were disruptive and classes sometimes ‘chaotic’, the principal told the Grattan Institute’s Dr Jordana Hunter and Ms Amy Haywood, Program Director and Deputy Program Director of Education, respectively.
Dr Hunter and Ms Haywood co-authored a report, The Reading Guarantee: How to give every child the best chance of success, released in February 2024, showing a third of Australian children can’t read proficiently. It claimed that a key cause of Australia’s reading problem is decades of disagreement about how to teach it.
A detailed case study of Churchill Primary was included in the Grattan Institute’s report. Its NAPLAN results were consistently poor, and struggling students were not catching up. In 2017, the principal introduced a school-wide, structured literacy approach.
Lessons became more engaging and explicit — teachers began breaking down the learning, modelling each step, and checking every two minutes, through questioning and mini-whiteboards, whether students were grasping the content.
Teachers now use this explicit approach to teach all the key reading sub-skills. In Foundation, teachers follow a systematic sequence, with students learning one or two sound-and-letter combinations a week. Students then practise at home using decodable texts.
Students at Churchill Primary also get plenty of opportunities to read more complex texts together. Students study a new book every week or two, with the teacher reading and re-reading it aloud, building oral language through rich class discussions, teaching new vocabulary, building background knowledge, and using comprehension strategies (making inferences, for example). Older students also study a novel every term.
All Churchill Primary students are screened upon arrival, and struggling students are identified. In junior years, a literacy specialist supervises trained teaching assistants to support about 25 students in small groups four times a week, following the MiniLit Sage and MacqLit programs. Students are grouped based on their decoding ability and are assessed fortnightly to adjust groups for each student’s progress.
In upper primary, students are placed in targeted groups during class time. A speech therapist provides one-on-one twice-weekly support for four students with language disorders.
As the principal told Dr Hunter and Ms Haywood, the introduction of a structured literacy approach was a huge shift in teaching practise for all staff at the school. It required significant investment. The school bought decodable texts, developed its own detailed scope and sequence and lesson slides, and sent every staff member to the five-day Orton Gillingham instructional training.
“We needed to build our teachers’ knowledge of how children learn to read and make some big decisions to abandon things that teachers had been doing for 10 to 15 years. Not only were we learning new things, but we were unlearning things we’d previously been taught,” the principal said.
Results came quickly. In 2016, almost half of the Year 3 students and 65 per cent of Year 5 students did not meet national minimum standards in reading. By 2021, no student performed below this standard for reading, and Year 3 students did better than the state average.
Today, fewer students receive catch-up support, because fewer students need it. Student behaviour has also improved – within three years there had been a 70 per cent reduction in students being sent out of class for poor behaviour.
“Probably our only regret is that we didn’t know more about this sooner – because if we had, we could have helped more kids,” the principal told Dr Hunter and Ms Haywood.
Calling for a revolution
Dr Hunter says the Grattan Institute is in contact with several schools doing work on the ground to improve student’s reading skills and had known about Churchill Primary School’s change in approach for some time and continues to follow its progress.
She says her team chose to investigate reading proficiency because reading is fundamental to success in and beyond school.
“Reading is a foundational skill that unlocks the broader curriculum and empowers young people to grasp opportunities for themselves and their communities,” she says.
“We focused on reading proficiency, as defined by the new NAPLAN proficiency benchmark, because we know that this measure indicates whether students are meeting grade-level expectations and are on track in their learning.”
Dr Hunter and Ms Haywood argue 90 per cent of students should be hitting this benchmark.
“This is achievable. For example, a Year 9 student who just meets the expected proficiency standard for reading is at about the level of the average Year 7 student,” they say.
Students who struggle with reading are more likely to fall behind their classmates, become disruptive, and drop out of school. They are also more likely to end up unemployed or in poorly paid jobs.
The report calculates that for those students in school today who are hardest hit by poor reading performance and drop out of school, the cost to Australia is $40 billion over their lifetimes.
“Australia needs a reading revolution,” Dr Hunter says. “We need to transform the way we teach reading in school, so that every Australian child gets their best chance in life. This report shows how to do it.”
The Grattan report calls on all Australian state and territory governments, and Catholic and independent school sector leaders, to commit to a six-step ‘Reading Guarantee’:
Pledge that at least 90 per cent of Australian students will become proficient readers.
Give principals and teachers specific guidelines on how to teach reading in line with the evidence on what works best.
Provide schools with the high-quality curriculum materials and assessments that teachers need to teach reading well.
Require schools to do universal screening of students’ reading skills and help struggling students to catch-up.
Ensure teachers have the knowledge and skills they need, through extra training, and by appointing Literacy Instructional Specialists in schools.
Mandate a nationally consistent Year 1 Phonics Screening Check, and regularly review schools’ and principals’ performance on teaching their students to read.
The report generated mainstream media interest, including from prime-time television programs such as The Project.
“We know that reading success is an issue close to the hearts of parents, teachers, and school leaders, and that reading failure can have a devastating impact on the lives of individual students,” Dr Hunter says.
“We think the level of interest reflects Australians’ deep commitment to ensuring all students get the opportunity to succeed.”
In many schools, teachers and school leaders have been working hard to implement evidence-informed reading instruction and this report acknowledges that work, Dr Hunter and Ms Haywood point out.
“At the same time, we know a lot of schools and teachers are struggling to implement best-practice approaches. Governments and sector leaders need to step up, take the evidence on reading instruction more seriously, and provide teachers and school leaders with real, practical guidance and support to ensure every child has the best opportunity to master this foundational skill,” they say.
Looking abroad
The report acknowledges some countries have made significant policy changes to help schools to teach according to the evidence, with positive results.
Dr Hunter and Ms Haywood say many international jurisdictions are stepping up to the reading challenge. Education systems in England, Ireland, some states in Canada, and several states in the US, have introduced comprehensive reforms over the past 10 years to close the gap between the research evidence and classroom practice.
“Mississippi, for example, is the poorest state in the US and was one of the first to implement comprehensive, evidence-informed literacy reforms, through its 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act,” they point out.
It invested US$70 million (AUD$105m) in early years reading programs for schools, fully funded all early years teachers to do a 160-hour two-year training course in reading instruction, mandated that all students’ reading skills in Foundation to Year 3 be assessed three times a year, and required Year 3 students to stay back a year if they were not meeting basic standards in reading.
“Mississippi lifted the proportion of students who met the ‘basic’ standard in reading in Year 4 from 53 per cent in 2013, to 63 per cent in 2022 – a 10 percentage point improvement in nine years, meeting the US national average,” Dr Hunter and Ms Haywood say.
“Where we do see these kinds of impressive improvements, they tend to result from long-term, system-wide reform. This is why we recommend a 10-year six-step ‘Reading Guarantee’ strategy be implemented in Australia.”
Grattan’s reports often make recommendations for both state and federal governments as well as school sectors to act upon. After a report’s release, the institute continues to engage closely with governments and schools to support the uptake of its recommendations.
“For this particular report, we’ll keep advocating for governments to implement our 10-year six-step Reading Guarantee strategy, through our consultations with political leaders, government departments, professional associations, and schools,” Dr Hunter says.
In the area of reading instruction, she says much of the heavy lifting will have to be done by state and territory governments and sectors.
“In recent years, some state governments and Catholic archdioceses have made stronger efforts to align school practise to the evidence base on the best way to teach reading,” Dr Hunter says.
“The NSW and South Australian governments, alongside the Catholic archdioceses of Canberra-Goulburn and Tasmania, have been leading the way. The Tasmanian, Western Australian, and Queensland governments have also taken some important first steps forward.
“While these steps are heartening, change will take time and long-term commitment from leaders.”
Success won’t be overnight
For primary school teachers and school leaders, Dr Hunter hopes they see that the Grattan Institute recognises the importance and complexity of their work, and the need for further practical supports from governments and sector leaders.
“It’s important for schools to know that by moving to a structured literacy approach, with a strong focus on phonics in the early years, it is possible to get children reading independently relatively quickly and confidently,” Dr Hunter says.
“This opens up the wider world of rich and engaging literature, where students can pursue their passions and develop a love of learning.”
She acknowledges that a structured literacy approach can take a while to embed well in all classrooms.
“School leaders should make sure there is enough time set aside for high quality training and professional collaboration to get started or fine-tune their existing approach,” Dr Hunter says.
“It can make a real difference for teachers to visit other schools in a similar context that are a little further along in the journey. Having the opportunity to watch a confident teacher who has already mastered the approach can be really inspiring, especially when you can see how engaging the approach can be for students.”
Dr Hunter and Ms Haywood emphasise a structured literacy approach is essential, particularly in the early years of school, to ensure all students have the opportunity to master foundational reading skills.
“But it is just as important for schools to keep a strong focus on building background knowledge and vocabulary to support reading comprehension,” they say.
Churchill Primary student’s improvement in reading also resulted in an improvement in their behaviour. But this is not an anomaly, Dr Hunter says.
“For instance, a 2019 Dutch study of about 600 students and 70 teachers found students with poor reading skills tended to have worse behaviour, and teachers were able to improve behaviour by providing high-quality reading instruction.”
“This was a really encouraging additional benefit to Churchill’s shift to a structured literacy approach and it is something we have heard anecdotally from other schools as well. Under Churchill’s previous instructional approach, students had a lot of independent reading time, and classes could be disruptive with students all reading different books. Now lessons look very different. They provide predictability and structure, giving students certainty about what’s expected in the classroom,” she says.EM
The Churchill Primary case study is published with permission from the Grattan Institute.
