In a pitch aimed at Victorian families, the opposition has pledged it will spend $2.8 million helping schools purchase “decodable readers” to help students practice their phonics skills.

It follows a campaign from parents of dyslexic children, who say children are being sent home with books that are hindering their ability to read.

Opposition education spokesman Tim Smith said the plan would ensure students with learning difficulties didn’t fall through the cracks.

“All students can benefit from learning to read with decodable books,” he said.

“Decodable books allow children to practice their decoding skills in a methodical way.”

Under the Coalition's plan, Mr Smith said teachers would also be encouraged to use their four days of professional learning to learn how to explicitly teach phonics.

Decodable books are sequenced so students incorporate new phonics skills that they have been taught in class.

They differ from predictable readers, which repeat the same sentence structure, with a few words changed on each page to reflect a new picture. For instance, a predictable text might read “I like cats, I like dogs, I like soccer”.

Simone Mitchell-Nolan, a mother-of-three who is also a member of Dyslexia Victoria Support, said it was wonderful the Coalition had responded so quickly to the group's campaign.

Her 13-year-old son was diagnosed with dyslexia at the end of grade two and used to hate reading the predictable texts he took home.

"He would often be in tears at night," she recalled. "One night he refused to read completely. He would say, 'Mum, I'm dumb.' It broke my heart."

Ms Mitchell-Nolan said she was never taught anything about phonics when she studied primary school teaching at university in the 1990s.

But she recently completed further training in phonics, purchased decodable readers, and taught her son to read.

One book might focus on all the "ai" and "ay" words like pain, rain and day, while another might focus on a different sound.

"He could get through a reader and actually enjoyed it," she said. "It changed his whole attitude to reading."

Her son is now in high school and has caught up with all his peers.

Her youngest child Jarran, 8, also has dyslexia and uses decodable readers.

"His self-esteem is fine," she said. "These are helpful for all children."

Centre for Independent Studies education researcher Jennifer Buckingham said predictable readers failed to test students on their phonics skills.

“Children with good memories and guessing strategies can look as though they are reading,” she said. “Then you present them with words they have never seen before, or there are no pictures and you can quickly see they don’t know how to read.”

She welcomed the pledge to fund decodable readers, and said when coupled with quality phonics instruction, they made a real difference to a child's outcomes.

The Coalition has previously promised that it will rollout a compulsory phonics screening check for all grade 1 students if it forms government.

Mr Smith said this intervention was vital. “In too many cases they fall behind their peers, which can lead to depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, school refusal, early dropouts and diminished educational and career options,” he said.

Victorian Education Minister James Merlino has previously said schools can use their existing funding to buy the readers.