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Transcript
ADDRESS AT THE LAUNCH OF THE FINAL REPORT OF THE NATIONAL INQUIRY INTO THE TEACHING OF LITERACY
8 December 2005
DR NELSON:
It’s very hard not to talk about this issue without being emotional. I’ve spent a lot of years going to graduations at the MULTILIT Centre of the Exodus Foundation in Sydney, when I was a backbencher. Thank you, Ken, for your leadership to this inquiry, for the members of the review committee. I was criticised for including a parent, but thank you Yvonne for bringing sanity and the normal world to the educational establishment.
I thank the deans, the specialist teachers and all of those who worked on the committee with you, Ken. Gregor Ramsey, the chairman of Teaching Australia, the secretary of my department Lisa Paul, John – it’s hard for me to say John Fleming without saying Father John Fleming – but I suspect there’ll be a place in heaven for you, and to Lisa, the secretary of my department, I’ll say this to you publicly. One of the many things I’ve done is initiate the Minister’s Awards for Excellence in Literacy and Numeracy. You will be receiving one next year, so you better write that down.
Alison, I can’t begin to explain. I agree with, obviously everything that you did, the program in Western Australia is absolutely brilliant. To all of you that are here, teachers, educators, representatives of the key reference groups that are involved in this, thank you very, very, much.
It’s interesting, when my department and my staff sent me a note through a few days ago for the slogan for the inquiry, they had these various words, and I just said, it’s pretty simple isn’t it? You know, reading is life.
And in fact, one of my heroes is Thomas Jefferson, of course, the third president of the United States of America. And to describe his greatest contribution throughout his life from all that he’d achieved, from founding the University of Virginia, and when he was asked why, he said because education is the defence of the nation. But it was Jefferson, in fact, who also said that once you learn to read, you are free forever, and that information is the currency of democracy.
I am a guilty minister. I’ve got to say that in the first few months I was in this job, issues would come up in relation to reading, and my hardworking officials in the department, who work for all Australians, they would give me a brief about it. So, there would be someone saying, there’s a problem with reading or something like that, and the department would give me information that would explain what the government is doing, give me the performance of Australia and international benchmarking; that we’re outperformed only by Finland in reading for students at the age of fifteen, that we do extremely well in other international tests. I suppose the problem the department has is I actually read everything that comes to me, and I was also troubled by the fact that I had many lingering memories from out the back of the church there in Ashfield in Sydney’s inner west.
And what I discovered is that all ministers, throughout this country, will every day get up and say, in defending what is defensible in many ways but indefensible in others, will say, yes, we’re doing extremely well. Everything’s terrific. But what those figures hide is about thirty per cent of Australian children who are leaving the school system in Australia are functionally illiterate.
I ask myself, as a layperson, how is it we can live in a country where a boy at the age of twelve, with neither a physical nor intellectual disability can seriously ask, I didn’t realise it’s the black stuff that you read. I didn’t realise you start on the left hand side and work to the right. I ask myself, why is it that one in twelve children cannot pass a very basic national reading benchmark in year three, and one in eight in year five. And the figures, of course, are much worse for indigenous students.
I ask myself why it is necessary for one in ten students studying teacher training at the University of Tasmania to be in a remedial literacy program. I ask myself why one in six of our ADFA recruits in first year, through UNSW, with a minimum tertiary entrance rank of eighty, that only one in six can achieve a minimum seventy per cent achievement in terms of grammar.
I too, John, I went to a primary school in Victoria. It wasn’t yours. But I’m going to get there, if Jenny lets me in. But I went to a primary school in Victoria about eighteen months ago, and the principal said, Brendan, Dr Nelson, you are most unwelcome here. Now, there’s nothing unusual about that for me, I get a lot of that. But I had been expressing concerns about standards, and the performance, and the publishing of performance, including reading performance in schools. And the principal said to me, you’ve seen this community, it’s very, very poor. She said, if they had any idea how badly we were performing, we’d be closed down within a year. Our job is to offer hope.
And I said, well, as fragile yet powerful emotion hope is, what point is there sending children to secondary school armed with hope, but not able to read or write. And if the performance is so poor, surely people would say, why. And they would be asking me, and they would be asking the relevant state minister why this is the case. Everything, John, that you presented, is the way it ought to be: inspiring leadership, well-trained teachers, specialist supervision of the teachers in their own teaching. The fundamental belief that it doesn’t matter where you come from, that you can actually learn.
As Ken said to me in the first few months I’ve been in this job, he said, it’s not what kids bring to school that determines where they end up. That determines where they start. But it’s what happens in the school.
I also ask myself, amongst all of the research that I have read, why is it that Ruth Fielding-Barnsley’s research from QUT, of three hundred and forty final year pre-service teachers and early career teachers, why is it that, when asked the question, a unit of pronunciation containing a vowel is A, a grapheme; B, a morpheme; C, a syllable or D, a phoneme, but fifty-six per cent could not identify a syllable and seventy-five per cent could not identify the sounds and the words.
And Ruth, in rejecting my criticism, based on the research, said I didn’t understand it. She said, as teachers, we can identify a syllable, it’s just we can’t explain it to anybody.
Now, that statement speaks for itself. Teachers should not be criticised. No teacher can be expected to teach what they do not know. When you go through Ken’s report, when you go through this report, I ask myself, why is it that in almost all of the university education departments, less than ten per cent of the core teaching time is spent on teaching future teachers how to teach reading. And, in almost half of the universities, less than five per cent of the time is spent training our teachers how to teach our children how to read. The argument is not one of phonics versus whole of language. It is about all teachers understanding both, understanding when they must apply the appropriate teaching methodology to a certain group of children. But it is also, as we understand from the report, that in those first three years, all teachers must know how to teach and to assess students and their ability to understand the structure of words, the basis of sentences, of grammar and pronunciation.
The report really focuses on three areas: appearance, teachers and schools. And I can tell you, I am not going to muck about with this report. Today is not a day for me, or state ministers or anybody else to come out and defend what’s going on. By all means, we should all talk about and talk up what is good. But the price we are paying for not focusing on that which is not good, is that John, and Alison and Bill and many, many others in this country are dealing with young people who find themselves in the advanced years of secondary education – if they’ve remained in it – barely able to read and write. And as we say, reading is life.
The recommendations around parents about reading aloud, about rhymes and teaching the alphabet to our children are extremely important. I will be looking at programs to support parents in terms of information, and materials for them, and workshops, and all sorts of things to really focus on it. And it’s always a risky business, but I will continue to work with Mem Fox in reading aloud activities, and we will be funding another reading aloud conference next year.
In schooling, John and Alison just represent all of it, and I’ve also read about Bill (indistinct) Lindsay in Alice Springs. They represent the reality of the rhetorical and educational aspiration in this. But it is going to have to be about every child having a literacy plan developed for them by their teacher and their parents. It’s also about making sure that when children first arrive at school, that they are tested. Not in the nonsensical way it was recently reported in terms of whether you pass or fail kindergarten, it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s about testing students in terms of their ability to hear. Can they actually hear; can they process sounds; what’s their phonemic understanding; to what extent do they understand and are able to manipulate sounds? Do what ... to what extent do they have any understanding of letters and how those letters relate to the parts of words.
I was at Seymour in Victoria during the election campaign, and one man said to me, Brendan, what are you going to do about early childhood education. He said, we’ve just enrolled a number of children in a kindergarten, and he said, seventy per cent have no concept of a book, zero. They do not understand that a book is something you open and has actually got words in it, and you can get some kind of meaning or story from it.
We also need to ensure that every school has access to a specialist educator, like Alison, who can actually help our teachers in classrooms deliver specialist programs that are appropriate and necessary to the children.
Though there is a resistance to it, testing is important. Testing in those first three years, the diagnostic testing in terms of plotting the growth, in terms of reading of children from kindergarten year one through their first three years. As a medical practitioner, we plot the growth of children in the first few years of life. We worry about them if they're not growing at the rate they should or their head circumference is not growing.
So too we should be equally concerned when they are at school.
In teacher training, I say to you Terry, Terry Lovett who is the Dean of Education at Newcastle university and up until very recently the head of the Council of Deans of Education. There is major reform to be undertaken in education faculties in Australia.
Rod Sawford I see here, himself a teacher, doing an outstanding job as the deputy-chair of the national inquiry into teaching. There will be reform; there has to be. Everything that we ... I have looked up, every review I have read in terms of the quality, nature and content of teacher training, it is extremely variable across the country. It will require a change in regulation and an increase in money.
Gregor Ramsey is the chairman of Teaching Australia. I will be asking Teaching Australia to build into the accreditation model for university education departments the requirement that everyone who is training to be a teacher will specifically be taught in a research-based way how to teach reading to children. That it shouldn’t be something which is focused entirely on the sociology of reading; that the basic science of reading based on evidence must be taught to teachers, and dare I say that they should be tested on that before they leave the university. After a recent ...
[Mobile phone rings]
... - it’s probably my wife, Gregor, telling me to sit down, I've spoken for too long – after a recent interview I gave on this topic, I received a 12 line email from a very unhappy man in Victoria. He said, started off: Dear Dr Nelson, you are a disgrace, so on and so forth.
It went on to tell me that I was wrong to suggest that all teachers are not equal and that the idea of rewarding teachers for good performance was inappropriate and so on, and he incorrectly interpreted this as some sweeping criticism of the teaching profession.
There were in those 12 lines nine spelling errors, two major and one minor grammatical error, but the most disturbing thing was at the end of it he said, I start my teaching career at – and named a particular school in Victoria in January - and I'm looking forward to it and I will make sure that everybody is aware that me, Nelson, are on the wrong track.
So I'm going to take this very seriously. If you bump into those friendly, loving people from finance, Treasury, any of those sort of agencies in the next few months, tell them to be kind to me through the Budget process. I have already focused on things that will need some funding. I will also be taking this to all of the state and territory ministers. This is an honest report; it exposes the significant and quite disturbing underbelly of poor reading performance in Australia. And I will also be immediately acting on some things, particularly those that involve parents and parental involvement in early reading.
So thank you to all of you for all of the work that you’ve done. If you're like me you probably get criticism over some of these things. I realise it is an emotional debate about the whole of language versus phonics. It’s an important debate but it is not one or the other. But I tell you, I expect ... for example, the average general practitioner that sees a person in Australia today that has high blood pressure, I expect that doctor to know, not only the causes of high blood pressure, but to have a suite of treatments for it and knowing which treatment is appropriate to which person.
There are fundamentals essential, as we know from the report, for every child in relation to reading and there are some instances where one approach is more important than another. And I think if there’s goodwill from the teaching profession, from the employers of teachers, and certainly from the Commonwealth, we should be able to make a significant difference.
The real battle for human and economic and social development in our country in my view is going to be fought and won or lost in our schools. And I thank you, all of you, for being warriors in that task. Thank you.
[ends]
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