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Transcript
Address to the First Meeting of the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy
Thursday 9 December 2004, Parliament House, Canberra
Brendan Nelson:
There are just a few things I’d like to say to you, if I may. My staff find it somewhat bemusing that I’m a big Slim Dusty fan, plus I’m trying to learn the guitar and it’s a dangerous combination. I said at the National Literacy Awards that Joe Daly, in 1954, wrote a song for Slim called Jackie and Slim changed the name of the song to call it Trumby, which is one of the creeks that flows through Nulla Nulla up near Kempsey. It’s a song about an Aboriginal stockman who was greatly admired, and in fact promoted to be the chief stockman and ringer on the farm. But he couldn’t read and he was illiterate. He was out droving cattle during the drought and stopped to fill up his water bag and there was a sign that was written on a piece of metal next to the water hole and he couldn’t read the sign. He filled up his water bag and he died. The sign had actually said the water was poisoned for the foxes. Slim Dusty asked the question, rhetorically at the end of the song, 50 years ago, why should a man die because he can’t read or write. Here we are, 50 years later, with all the things we’ve achieved. Perhaps people don’t die in our country because they can’t read or write but certainly they’re disadvantaged in so many ways.
I am a lay person in education, as you know. Unlike most of you I’m no expert, but I’ve probably had a lot more training in education given I’m a medical graduate. We recently published the PISA results, as you know, a couple of days ago and the general theme from some quarters seems to be “well we’re going pretty well by international standards so why is Nelson having an Inquiry into reading and so on and so forth”. My concern is not so much for the children, perhaps of most of us that are sitting around the table, even though some of you, like all parents have had trouble, generally I think parents who are well educated and relatively affluent tend to find their way through the system. My real concern is for the children of everyday parents who are working hard, who are trying to feed their kids, their car loans and their mortgages, who often have limited education themselves, whose children are struggling at school with reading, who are getting, in some cases getting jargonistic school reports that don’t mean a lot to them, who sense that there’s something wrong with the reading skills their children have and aren’t always getting the kind of support that they actually need.
Kevin Wheldall and Max Colthart and his colleagues who wrote me a letter back in April, are concerned that they way in which we are teaching reading is not based on best evidence. That’s disputed by an equal number of eminent experts in the field, but my real concern is that – I ask myself why is it, that 50 years after Slim sings about Trumby, why is it that I can go to places in this country, not to remote Aboriginal communities, sure I go to them and I can find 8 or 9 kids out of 10 that are like this, but why do I go to inner suburban cities like Sydney and find children that cannot read a word, after five years in the education system can’t read a word, not a single word. I get very emotional about this sort of thing. I’m determined to try and do something about it. There are challenges. As you know, the Federal Government does not run a school or employ a teacher-some days that’s a blessing some days it’s a curse. By and large the teaching profession needs great credit to be given to it for everything that it does, often in spite of Governments, not because of them. But I’m determined to try and get to the heart of what is actually happening in schools.
The Inquiry will be informed by a Literature Review, much of which is already done of course, in terms of evidence, in terms of reading, what works, what doesn’t work, what’s the evidence for it and so on and so forth. I chose Ken for the Inquiry because he’s a man possessed of an enormous amount of common sense. Everything that I’ve ever heard Ken Rowe say is based on evidence and if people say things to him and make assertions to him he’ll frequently, I’ve often heard him say “what’s your evidence for that?” And that’s really what this has got to be about.
What we’ve got to do is find out exactly how kids are being taught in schools. A lot is said to me by advocates of Government and non Government schooling and by teachers. They say “oh we do this, we do that”. I’d really like you to tell me, and when I say me I mean tell Australia actually how our kids are being taught to read. Is the way in which they are being taught to read supported by real evidence of best practice? How are our kids being taught to read if you know we’ve established a beach-head, it’s taken seven years, we’ve finally got a beach-head now in terms of national performance benchmark testing and reporting to parents, but they are minimum benchmarks and I think Max Colthart is right when he criticises it as being a minimum benchmark. There are kids that are passing those 3, 5 and 7 benchmarks who still are struggling.
So I’d also like you to look at that issue about the standard of the benchmark test. I’d also like you to give us some advice on whether we’re testing it in the right way. One of my colleagues for example, asked the Prime Minister, he said “why are we doing a reading test where kids don’t actually read?” Good question. So I’d like you to have a look at that. The other thing that’s extremely important – if I ever think I’m having a bad day I think of Terry Lovatt and then I think my life is not so bad. Terry, apart from being the Dean of Education at Newcastle University, is the President of the Council of Deans of Education. I’ve said this to Terry before, but I said, I’ve got something in relation to education in fact that I had in relation to ATSIC when I started on during the discovery 12 years ago in relation to Aboriginal Australia and I spent my first 12 days in the Northern Territory, in remote parts, and I came back and I said to then Robert Tickner, “I can’t find a single person in the country that’s got anything positive to say about ATSIC”, including people on ATSIC Councils.
It seems, often, that there is criticism of education faculties and the way in which teachers are being trained and the third an arguably most important strand to the Inquiry is to look at the way in which the next generation of teachers is actually being taught to teach kids how to read. And Ruth Fielding-Barnsley’s study, a relatively small one I must add, at QUT nonetheless raised this concern with me when half of the final year teaching graduates, undergraduates and early career teachers don’t know what a syllable is and more so, three quarters apparently can’t identify the sounds of a word. I don’t expect to be doing it next week, but if I had to I could take somebody’s appendix out. Similarly I’d like to think that teachers recognising that children are all different and need perhaps a different approach, I’d like to be able to think that they would be able to adopt a good phonics approach in the appropriate circumstance.
So that is arguably in fact the most important part of the Inquiry. I don’t mean this in any threatening sense, but I’ve had to deal with, as all of you have I know, I’ve had to deal with parents in tears, who have discovered to their great distress that their children, at the age of 9 or 10 are barely literate. They don’t know how to change anything, they go to the school, they say things to Principals – I won’t repeat the sort of responses they get – they don’t know how to shift education bureaucracies, they don’t know where to start. This business, for us, is all about standing up for everyday parents and bringing commonsense to the whole Inquiry. There shouldn’t be any place for extremism in this.
It’s interesting that John Kenneth Galbraith made the observation that given the choice of change or proving it unnecessary most people get working on the proof. From Letters to the Editor of papers, basically people seem to be doing right just that at the moment and most of them seem to be in the education field – everything’s terrific! And perhaps for the majority of children it is terrific. And there is no doubt that there have been improvements, but I am quite concerned that still, even with the PISA results, 11% of the kids are in the bottom two bands. So when I say there’s no place for extremism, there are people in the education field who feel extremely strongly about certain teaching methods over others and what I’d really like you to do, collectively, is apply commonsense and evidence to what will ultimately be the Report.
I’d like to get the Report, if I can, in the second half of next year, about August, if that is possible. But it’s more important it be done properly than be done in a hurried sort of way and I think there’s every indication at the moment that the State Governments are, perhaps while thinking in some cases it’s a superfluous inquiry and not necessary, the State Governments at least seem prepared to co-operate and I think from what I know of all of you, I think you’ll basically get on with each other. Yvonne is a very shy and retiring lady, and one thing that impressed me about Yvonne by the way, Yvonne said to me “I’m not an expert, I don’t know a lot about it”. Another person I asked said something like that, I won’t name that person. Yvonne has had her child in both Government and non-Government schools and she made a very interesting comment – she said “when we moved from one sector to the other the teacher had been infected with the same virus”. I thought that was a very telling remark, because it comes back, which all of us know, that the single most important thing is the quality of teaching. My concern is it’s not just what I’ve seen at the Exodus Foundation, but all over the country.
I’ve sat in a room like this, less equipped if you like, in Seymour. I was at the Seymour High School and one of the members of the School Council – this is about 4 months ago – he said to me “I am involved with a local kindergarten (inaudible)” he said, “we’ve just enrolled 40 kids”, he said “30 of those kids who are starting do not know what a book is, do not know the concept of what a book is”.
So the challenge is not just in the school environment it begins elsewhere.
Ends
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