Pamela Snow:

There’s no such thing as a quiet year in education, but 2024 has been a notably non-quiet year, especially for reading instruction in the state of Victoria, Australia. On June 13, the Victorian Deputy Premier and Minister for Education, the Hon. Ben Carroll MP released a media statement signalling a new direction of travel for Victorian schools with respect to early years reading instruction. 

Specifically, the Department announced that it is mandating the use of 25 minutes of systematic synthetic phonics and phonemic awareness instruction in all Victorian classrooms, Foundation to Year 2, as of Term 1, 2025. I blogged back in June about the sustained advocacy by many, many stakeholders, over a number of years, that led to this historic announcement and again commend the Minister on this momentous and shape-shifting change in Victorian education. It has been refreshing and impressive in equal measure to see the quality of the work undertaken by the Department since the June announcement, culminating in the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0, high-quality lesson plans, discontinuation of the psychometrically weak English Online Interview, in favour of a robust and efficient Phonics Screening Check, and high-quality, accessible information for parents.

The usual colour and movement ensued from some quarters about this announcement. The Victorian Branch of the Australian Education Union immediately went into overdrive about Minister Carroll’s media release reflecting a lack of respect for teacher autonomy, and was critical of what was seen as a lack of consultation. I wonder if doctors and nurses who work in our public hospitals expect to be consulted via their unions on infection control protocols, or whether these are simply matters which policy makers, as consumers of evidence, should distil into knowledge-translation formats that ensure the best outcomes for end-users of the system, in that case, patients. It was disappointing that the education union made no reference to the needs of students.It missed an opportunity to be part of the education tipping point that could, over time, result in significant social justice benefits to all students, but most notably to those in equity groups who are constantly sold short when instruction is not of the highest and tightest possible calibre: students from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds, students from rural and regional areas, those from English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EALD) background, and/or those who have special education needs such as learning difficulties and other forms of neurodiversity that heighten, rather than diminish their need for high-quality instruction. Such students were a focus of the 2024 Grattan Institute Reading Guarantee Report authored by Jordana Hunter, Anika Stobart and Amy Haywood.

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“An emphasis on adult employment”.