The Minister for Education and Training, Senator the Hon Simon Birmingham, released a report on Monday authored by principals, teachers and academics into the need for literacy and numeracy checks, and possible methods for intervention into grade one students who fall behind.
Speaking at a press conference in Adelaide, the Education Minister said “around one in 20 Australian children don’t meet the national minimum standard in terms of their year three literacy skills”.
The report recommends a national standardised test in year one, checking numeracy and literacy, specifically phonics?—?the method for teaching reading and writing in English by developing the relationship between sounds of words and spelling patterns.
Based on a British model, this new process would differ from NAPLAN as results would not be made public. Fearful of Australia’s recent decline in OECD education rankings, the Minister confirmed in an interview on Channel Nine’s The Today Show with Ms Lisa Wilkinson, that “they (proposed tests) literally consist of a school teacher, could even be the classroom teacher, sitting down in a one-on-one format with a list of words and sounds and numbers that a child would read back to the teacher… it’s the type of thing that many schools of course already do but we are wanting to make sure that in every school in every classroom every child gets the chance to be proven as meeting the type of standards of learning you’d expect”.
Responding on behalf of the Opposition, the Hon Tanya Plibersek MP, said “it makes no sense to have a new test that identify kids who are falling behind if you are not prepared to fund schools to help those children catch up”.
