I have 4 children, 19 grandchildren and 6 great grandchildren. Every decade the literacy levels seem to get worse and of even more importance, teachers aren’t picking up those who can’t read or do basic maths.
For years now I have been using NAPLAN results to show me where the grandchildren in my care, and those close to me, are failing and 15 years ago bought an old fashioned reading program based on known teaching methods and this program is now being used on the 6 th child in the family who has been struggling.
I have also been using the online program Maths on line to improve numeracy in some grandkids. It costs money but anything is better than the total illiteracy coming out of our schools. It seems only those really bright kids, or ones with dedicated parents, are coping.
Part of the problem is teachers reluctance to discipline kids and I have been stunned at how grateful highschool teachers have been when I encouraged them to discipline a teenage granchild who was acting out at school.
If the system doesn’t change we are going to become the laughing stock of the world and suffer a huge shortage of workers capable of doing more than swinging a shovel.

One thing positive about education in Australia - we are rid of that idiot, Birmingham, from the portfolio. But, a literary standard of 39th out of 41: hell’s bells! It is quite obvious, too, displayed everyday by our university-miseducated 'journalists’ and the Ocker, nasally sheilas infesting their ABC. It's all very well to say that it's “unacceptable”, but we have been accepting it for a long time now, and nothing is being done, because those people who are the cause of the problem, the ones expected to fix the problem, are barely literate themselves. And there are “400,000 children in schools who cannot read” simply because their teachers are not very good at reading either. The rot was spread among the so-called educators long ago. One state in Australia accepts a score of 17.9 to get into teaching! The acceptable score is 80!

Australia is not capable of educating its children any more and, consequently, incapable of training them for the workforce. We will soon be the the ignorant fuzzy wuzzies needing to be governed by educated immigrants. Perhaps that is why our also-dumb politicians are swamping us with immigrants. But, hang on: immigrants who can speak English don't want to come here anymore. Bugger!

Like so many things these days parents seem to repudiate responsibility for the rearing of their children from discipline to education. I was already reading and writing to a great extent before I attended year one, taught to me by my mother.

From political correctness to education we seem to have lost our way and are adopting attitudes and methods than have been shown not to work.

Let's get back to a good grounding in phonetics for instance and away from newfangled ideas from mostly Left Leaning Idealist who think that teaching is a sinecure which they don't appear to have an aptitude for when at University...... If what I read about illiteracy is correct in these establishments.

Over education is “the” blight of our society….more work, less life-style at taxpayer expense!

A little more emphasis on morals and truth would result in much better literacy and numeracy outcomes. Isn't it academia that has sold out to pseudo science to embrace the gw fantasy hence causing aussies to pay far to much for power.

The social engineers told us that smacking children resulted in violence. Now with no smacking we have untold violence against teachers and other students. We have a moral deficiency problem in academia whose dogmas have produced such a non thinking illiterate bunch. I mean look at who they are likely to vote in at next election. Says it all.

Following on from the benighted runner perhaps everyone should be made to participate in the kind of "education" described on on this website:
http://www.aceministries.com
The purpose of which is to create one-dimensional ultra conformist zombies.

'The purpose of which is to create one-dimensional ultra conformist zombies.'
yep even that would be better than the self entitled getup/antifa brats who have a life of ease thanks to other peoples hard work and now can do nothing but demonise those who gave them such comforts. One of those are we daffy?

With the exception of BigNana and Daffy Duck, it is very clear that the rest of the commentariat on this article have NOT seen the inside of a class room since they left school so many years ago. Polite discussion seems to be out of place on this site and informed discussion is similarly lacking.

I am proud to say that I am a retired high school teacher and that in as many lessons per week as I could fit it in, the language of my subject and general literacy were there. Literacy is NOT an exit card from Infants school: it is every teachers' job. Phonics is needed but so is whole-language for all those words which cannot be correctly pronounced using phonics rules. For these, there is no alternative to learning, by rote, how to pronounce them.

English is NOT a phonetic language.

I am waiting to hear what others have to say.

From the executive summary of the report, "The attention of the Inquiry Committee was drawn to a dichotomy between phonics and whole-language approaches to the teaching of reading. This dichotomy is false. Teachers must be able to draw on techniques most suited to the learning needs and abilities of the child."

It is not an either/or situation: phonics and whole language can, and do, live comfortably side-by-side in the best class rooms.

Look at this list of words and wonder you could teach a language learner how to say them whenever any of these was encountered.
Is phonics a help here?

bough/ plough
cough/ trough
enough
through
thorough

My eldest was reading, writing & doing arithmetic well before school. The other two were too lazy or disinterested.

However they were lucky. They all went to a small 3 teacher & teaching head country school.

The combined first & second class was taught for years by a dear old granny, who stood no rubbish, & threw out all the new fangled garbage teaching aids & ideas, as quickly as some clown in head office developed.

She taught her beginners just as she had when she started teaching in 1950. No kid got through 2 years of her & her 1950 teaching techniques unable to handle the 3 Rs.

It was a tough time in schools. That idiot Goss gave teachers a huge wage rise, but did not bother to fund it. As treasurer of our P&C I saw the extra costs loaded onto us the parents. We even had to fund the chalk, pencils & paper for classes. Teachers had higher wages, but stuff all support with materials.

This did not effect our granny, I doubt she even noticed she was richer. She still made sure the kids left her care with a full grounding in the basics. It was only after she retired, replaced by kids trained in all the new thinking, that kids started entering 3Rd class with no skills at all

Some of these skills used to be taught/ supported by parents but with both parents working and teachers taking on some of the parenting responsibilities and in a repressive environment- perhaps some teaching capacity has been lost. Yes "English is not a phonetic language" but this didn't stop children in the past- an anecdotal survey indicates a lowering of outcomes. In some dictionaries there used to be facial diagrams to help with pronunciation until linguists apparently denigrated it. Perhaps children could read/ speak aloud more. Reading, writing, speaking, listening- all of these skills need to be practiced daily for proficiency. But language/ teaching is not my core expertise. Perhaps high immigration has made teacher duties more challenging due to a higher proportion of children in homes speaking other than Australian English. Perhaps there are too many requirements and subjects in todays schools to provide focused learning. Perhaps the standards of teachers have dropped since "Brian of Buderim" taught. Society has changed, Education outcomes have degraded- maybe we should change society and education back to the way it was...

The world is what we make it.

The social engineers told us that smacking children resulted in violence.
runner,
At the risk of Lexi coming down on me like a tonne of bricks again, my guess is that these social engineers were 100% Academic.

It would be interesting to know how many adults were functionally illiterate back in the good old "olden days" before the very questionable and dubious whole language approach became fashionable.

As far as I can remember I read some time ago that it may have as high as 30% or even more. As a corroborating anecdote I live in a Victorian country town, the population of which is 8,000. My lawyer/solicitor recently told me that 25% of her clientele (especially older people) both in my town and in Bendigo too are functionally illiterate.

There are also many other factors as to why a significant number of young people have difficulty in learning anything in school,
especially with reading - brain dysfunction for instance. For example do a search on the topic Kinesiology and learning difficulties, especially the work of Charles Krebbs via his remarkable book titled A Revolutionary Way of Thinking : From a Near-Fatal Accident To a New Science of Healing

Thank you for your article and highlighting how the apparently first world education system fails to deliver the basics: literacy and numeracy. Whilst de facto every child has a universal access to education, in reality the majority have to do with a local, often under resourced school that is located in a mortgage stress belt, defunct mining boom towns or troublesome neighbourhoods.

Add to this cocktail: an inconvenient truth that many of these children come from homes disadvantaged in some way for many reasons; and a fact that teachers today spend a disproportionate amount of time on admin and “risk management” tasks, not on teaching.

The end result is: the lucky few children at the “good schools” enjoy the advantages whilst the majority is left behind. My son attends “a good school” and his amazing teachers ensured that at the age of 6 he can read fluently, do arithmetic easily and can dissect a sentence into a noun, a verb and an adjective. But it is not the reality for many others of his age.

I do not have the knowledge of the education system in Australia in 1980s. However, as your article has correctly highlighted, whatever the system looked like, it delivered. So the questions is, where and when did it go horribly wrong?

Actually, what's learning got to do with insufficient funding ? What more do some teachers need to show kids how to read & write ? How will more funding make teachers more intelligent ?

BoB, it appears the balance of phonics versus word recognition is not right. To what would you otherwise attribute the poor level of literacy?

I remember as school kid having a graded reading comprehension system (like this: https://www.edsco.com.au/products/category/NAOMHAEK-sra-kits-reading-boxes ) that was challenging and gave a sense of progress being made.

From experience as a parent I know that reading to kids models an ability they then aspire towards themselves, and that correcting them as they read aloud is very effective. Parents need to prioritize reading, if nothing else kids get loaded with to do at home, as it is the foundation for further learning.

Why do teacher unions oppose diagnostic testing?

Thanks Jo Rogers for your article.

//Australia has a major problem. UNIFEC rates Australia's Literacy standards as 39th in the world out of 41 countries.//

If you're the one supposed to have all the answers on literacy and you think that's how UNICEF is spelt, it would seem that we have a quite a problem indeed.

"Why do teacher unions oppose diagnostic testing?"

Possibly because they fear misdirected accountability where someone outside the classroom, no outside the school, can look at a set of figures taken well out of context, and impose a change in the published curriculum.

BoB, why is that a problem once the higher authority has listened to the teacher/school?

Brian of Buderim, how about a few facts in your posts.

You must know, if you taught until recently, just how far the standard of scholarship of teachers has slipped in your time. We can blame Whitlam for opening up university education to people of even below average scholarship. Teachers courses get the left overs, rather than the cream.

From my matriculation class in 1957, 3 of us got open company scholarships to do BSc courses. 3 more got some form of teachers scholarship to do a BSc.

5 more got teachers scholarships to do arts.

2 went into the family business, & one back to the farm.

All the rest got 2 year teachers collage scholarships.

Almost the entire cream of that years crop became teachers. Little wonder our teachers were great.

As the founder, with my wife of the P&C school textbook hire system in our local 1600 student high school, I had a fair bit to do with the teachers, & particularly the subject masters, for 12 years.

With that scheme we saved parents about half the cost of books & materials, while putting between $100,0000 & $170,000 into the school funds each year. The hardest thing to do in that scheme was to get some subject masters to put a few hours effort into telling us what books would be required for next years courses. A few hundred hours of volunteer work was required after the books were bought.

About 30% of those subject masters were simply going through the motions, with no interest in the kids. Even worse, about 20% of the teachers, particularly in senior math & physics could not have passed an exam in the subject they were supposed to be teaching.

Continued.

Continued.
The reason teachers are so against tests is, as we are seeing, it shows up those teachers who fail to teach any kids anything over many years. In an education system, run for the kids, they would be long gone. However our system, controlled by the union, is run for anyone but the kids.

When one biology teacher was told to teach senior math C he told the subject master & head master that he couldn't even do it, let alone teach it. When told to "muddle through" he resigned. He should have stayed for the kids sake. The Indian woman given the job, would have failed a junior math B exam

Hasbeen, we have been down this path at least once before. It is to your credit that you have done all the things you have done for the good of one school.It is very difficult for you to validly extrapolate your volunteer experience of one school across a number of others. The school you supported may have been the average of all the schools in one state, it may have been an outlier either better or worse. When it comes down to it, it is just one school.

Luciferase, the problem with top-down syllabus reconstruction is that teachers are very rarely asked for any input particularly when a top-level bureaucrat or a fast-ascending politician wants to build a reputation for "getting things done".

Cynical? I've seen it happen too many times. What looks perfect from cloud-cuckoo land by the time is has drifted down to the chalk-face is frequently unworkable.

Brian while I agree with you that much syllabus development has been dreadful, too much input from academics & not enough from the classroom, teachers MUST stick to the syllabus once it is set.

You say my experience is at one school, but so is a teachers. With our much more mobile population schools must make it easy for kids transplanted into a new schools, by using the same syllabus, in the same order, at the same time. Teachers running off at a tangent may be good for some pupils, & fun for teachers, but is too damaging to some kids to be allowed.

I can't see any escape from testing to achieve a relativistic look at a teacher's and a schools (teachers') performance.

From a school's perspective, some expectation of its performance must arise from an understanding of its demographic, so it can be compared with schools of similar ilk.

From a teacher's standpoint, if standards fall under their watch, consistently, it should be observable as students move through the years through a number of teachers while having their literacy regularly externally measured.

Those charged with oversight of schools and teachers must have the right to try to correct matters, if Oz is to rise in the rankings. Unions should not stymy this.

If your cynicism has a basis, BoB, it may be in the overseers too often having insufficient classroom experience to be capable of fully informed judgement of the data. Too many aspire their way into management without spending enough time in the ranks, in many industries, leading to simplistic, alienating, organizational solutions. The trouble, too, is that those in the ranks wear the odium for poor outcomes, rather than management. All the above has gone on since time immemorial.

Luciferase, your last paragraph makes my point precisely. Many of those making policy have never been in a state school classroom, having been educated at an independent school, and they have no idea of the problems faced by teachers working with students with unhelpful attitudes to attendance, behaviour or work rate. The parents of many students did not have success when they [parents] were at school and the attitude of the parents is reflected in the performance (or lack of it) of their children.

State schools lack the ability to expel or in, the case of many principals I have worked with, the drive to begin the long, slow process of convincing higher-ups of the need for it

When PE teachers are teaching Maths and Physics it's a new low. You can't inspire children when the teachers aren't inspired.

Perhaps it's time to import proper teachers ?

Dear Jo,
you talk of literacy in your article and yet I find it hard to reconcile the figures you put forward in your article. So I decided to fact check...
"Australia has a major problem. UNIFEC rates Australia's Literacy standards as 39th in the world out of 41 countries. 2016 International PIRLS literacy results of Year 4 children found 21% cannot read and there was a 'significantly long tail of under-achievement' of other Year 4 children."
I would ask that you reply and provide your sources for your statistics because they don't seem to come from the sources themselves.
UNIFEC(?) doeesn't rate Australia's Literacy standards. But part of the measures UNICEF took in the 2017 Innocenti Report card did look at an element of 'quality education' which mass media also misquoted, as the element where Australia fell down was pre-school attendance. Apart from that we did quite well (above the average)- literacy included.

And I'm wondering where you got your PIRLS data from? "The latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) results, released today by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), show 81 per cent of Australian Year 4 students are achieving at or above the Intermediate benchmark (the proficient standard for Australia), compared to 76 per cent in 2011, with more students achieving at the High or Advanced benchmark." The article here "https://www.teachermagazine.com.au/articles/pirls-2016-year-4-reading-and-literacy-results" quotes the numbers correctly. That can only leave a possible 19% to be below the Intermediate benchmark, not 21 as you say (curious where the 21% came from) and which is a bit of a stretch to then suggest there is therefore 19% (or 21) illiteracy.

Well done, MrCentury. It will be interesting to see the response.

19% 21%, what is the bloody difference, grade 4's can't read, full stop. They should ALL be able to read.
Teachers pull your fingers out ! After all, you have a pretty strong Unoion when you want a payrise, so how about using that Union to get better teaching enabled ?

Mr 100,

http://www.teachermagazine.com.au/articles/pirls-2016-year-4-reading-and-literacy-results

Fixed it for you, no reflection on your computer skills but rather on OLO's dislike of the 's' in 'http'; it's just an OLO thing that we must live with.

Individual- your post demonstrates perhaps an antagonistic approach and a misunderstanding of the problem. If more than 80% are succeeding that is a far cry from "grade 4's can't read, full stop." There are many factors (mentioned in the reports) which can influence non-achievement of an intermediate standard which tend to reflect societal influence more than teacher impact. The antagonistic approach that many seem to display must be inspired by people willfully mis-reading the data.
Pay rises for teachers- you mean trying to keep in line with CPI?
& Funny that the unions tried hard to get the first Gonski deal to go through which would have seen funding increase dramatically to help support the very types of programs and teacher training and development based around increasing numeracy and literacy, instead of the new Gonski 2.0 which basically gutted all that. So individual, were you onboard with Gonski 1.0 (or even know what it was)?
And cheers Is Mise

And just for you individual,
Just read some of the released NAPLAN results in meeting Reading benchmark- look at those percentages
year 3s: ACT- 97%, NSW, Vic and QLD- 96%
year 9s: ACT- 97%, NSW and Vic- 94%, QLD, SA and Tas- 92%
Even though NAPLAN could be considered controversial...

Mr Century,
There's no point in debating real problems with people who benefit from the problem.

If more than 80% are succeeding that is a far cry from "grade 4's can't read,
Mr Century,
And what livelihood to you envisage both the 80% & the 20& to enter into in another 20 years ?
My guess is much of the 80% will be absorbed by the public service & public funded enterprise & public fund draining & most of the 20% will be on welfare.
A very small %age from both will be engaged in meaningful, revenue producing employment in the private sector. That, to me is not a good prospect.

Dear individual,
I apologise as my implications may have been unclear. Let me state it clearly- The 20% referred to do not exist in the "I cannot read category". Those students simply scored lower than the benchmark, on a sliding scale, in a single test, in a small sample size (6,000 out of 280,000 year 4s). Look at the NAPLAN data I presented. It (again a single test, but this time taken by the majority of Australian students in a year level) paints a different picture than the negative one subscribed to for reading ability.
You now raise the issue of this PIRLS test's results (reminder- a test taken by a small representative number of school students, not all students) on the prospect of future livelihoods. Apart from the misreading of the percentages (because it was a small sample size, not like the NAPLAN which is virtually all students in a year level), I can tell you right now, that mindset needs to change regardless. In the future it won't matter if you can read or write to get a job, because our understanding of economic models needs to change. Our literacy numbers are good but large numbers of literate people won't be able to get a job. The jobs won't exist in the manner/numbers they do now (or have in the past). You only have to look at the demise of manufacturing and any other job potentially affected by going offshore and increased AI/robotic usage. The economy itself will be radically different. Welfare would do best to remove the negative stereotyping and provide a 'basic income' for all individuals. Particularly with an aging population and a shrinking workbase (an argument which we don't even have to take literacy into account).

individual,

>There's no point in debating real problems with people who benefit from the problem.

Do you benefit from the problem? If so, how?
Some of your posts here seem to indicate you may be afflicted by the problem, but I can't see how you'd benefit from it.

Do you think others here benefit from the problem? Again, if so, how?

Either way, your statements wrong because the debates are read by many more people than just the current participants.

Now, why do you surmise that most of the 20% (who, contrary to Jo's assertion, aren't illiterate despite being below the expected standard at that stage) will be on welfare 20 years from now? And why do you expect such a big increase in employment in the public sector and their suppliers?

Mr Century,
I'm looking at the result of education as it has been for three decades on a daily basis. bad spelling, unable to add basic sums or measurments, lack of aptitude in anything trade related, lack of logic in anything practical/useful, lack of consideration, lack of motivation, lack of many social requirements etc. etc.
The only obvious aptitude is on using digital gadgetry.
No amount of here & there percentage, surveys & whathaveyou is doing anything positive towards rectifying this dumbing down in basic education. Most smart cluey kids do go on but what about the insane waste of resources for teachers who're supposedly educating all Kids ?
Many don't morally deserve half of what they're getting & I'm saying this from very close personal observation & interaction with (Qld) teachers.

Individual; a friend asked two radio tech trainees to make three guy
wires for a 20 metre tower, with 10 metres stakes from the base.
He came back to find them drawing on paper a triangle to scale and
measuring the length of the guy wires.
He pointed out that a 1 mm error in measuring on the paper would be
quite large in reality. He told them to calculate it.
They didn't have a clue and both had done the higher school
certificate and passed. He had to explain sq rt of sum of the squares.
I remember doing that in 1st year high school geometry.
Wasn't that Pythagorist's work ?

They probably couldn't spell "Pythagoras" either. :-)

Anyone who thought all kids were once able to read after two or three years of school back in the 60's could not have been teaching back then. Having done so, I can assure readers that in any cohort of 8 year old children in the 60's and 70's there was a significant number of pupils who either had not begun reading or were reading at a standard below that anticipated. Perhaps falling 'literacy' standards need to be addressed through families, rather than schools. I cannot imagine how one adult working with ten or twenty (or more) children can be as effective as working with a group of parents, showing them how to facilitate their children's literacy from birth (and before). OR given that school success has been consistently shown to be associated with family socio-economic status, then maybe we need to more closely consider the increase in the nation's economic divide since the 1960's.