All Victorian state schools will embrace phonics from next year as the government tries to improve reading levels in prep to year 2 students across the state.
The government has announced an updated Teaching and Learning Model for all government schools to be implemented from next year that focuses on what’s known as “explicit teaching”.
Students from prep to grade 2 will be taught reading using synthetic phonics, which helps students break up words into individual sounds.
Teachers will spend a minimum of 25 minutes a day on explicit teaching of phonics and phonemic awareness in classrooms.
All Victorian state schools will be required to use this approach when teaching reading.
Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll said the move followed research by the Australian Education Research Organisation and the Grattan Institute which showed explicit teaching works best for the largest number of students.
“The evidence shows that explicit teaching and the use of systemic synthetic phonics instructions gets results – while we already lead the nation in NAPLAN results, we’re always looking to improve, especially in relation to lifting outcomes for disadvantaged students,” he said.
“We want to ensure that every student in a Victorian government school is taught to read using the evidence-base that fosters the strongest outcomes.”
La Trobe University speech-language pathologist Pamela Snow welcomed the move, saying phonics was a proven teaching method.
“A lot of teachers are saying to us at La Trobe that this way of teaching is transformational, ‘I wish I learned this at university. And we are going to need all universities to get on the bus with this,'” she said.
Professor Snow said a uniform approach to reading across schools would deliver the best outcomes.
“We can’t have entire education systems only meeting the needs of those more able and more advantaged students,” she said.
“We’ve got to have systems that bring everybody along, and get 95 per cent plus of children across the bridge.”