A teacher's perspective on the growing debate on how we teach our kids to read

I was a teacher for 50 years, and I know there is nothing more heartbreaking than having a student in your classroom who can't read. The distress experienced by children is daily and repetitive. They don't blame their teacher or the "system", they blame themselves.

In the 1940s Marie Clay, a New Zealand researcher, set out to find out why some children struggle to learn to read. She observed that beginner readers used a range of strategies to problem solve when they come across an unknown word like using context, pictures and clues. On the assumption that this was the way good readers learn to read, Marie developed the Reading Recovery program for struggling first graders, based on these strategies.

The program has been hugely popular across English-speaking countries and by the early 2000s it was in most schools in Victoria, where I spent many years teaching including working for six years as a Reading Recovery teacher. While many of my students thrived, some gradually regressed over the years. And those kids were often left feeling even more discouraged.

I wanted to find something that worked for all my students. I investigated the research on reading acquisition that was coming out of national reviews of reading in Australia, America, and the United Kingdom in the 2000s. I realised Reading Recovery didn't align with the contemporary research, especially neurobiological research based on brain imaging of children learning to read. I believe we should adapt when we have new knowledge, so I started applying the recommendations from these national reviews and found that this approach worked for all readers, including children with dyslexia and other disabilities.

The reality is that about 70 per cent of children will eventually learn to read well, regardless of the teaching method. However, around 30 per cent of children struggle with reading and the whole language philosophy and methodology associated with Marie Clay's research, which has underpinned teacher training and practice since the 1980s, has been totally discredited as a teaching-learning approach for such children.

We see the end result of the failure to update literacy teaching in the light of modern research in the prison system. For example, the NSW Department of Corrective Services found that, in 2001, 60 per cent of inmates were functionally illiterate. These inmates could have had a different life if they had been explicitly taught the core skills for reading. This approach is beneficial for all students, and harmful to none.

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As a teacher, I was not backed by an education system that supported me to find and help children who were struggling. It is assumed teachers intuitively know how best to tailor programs to the different needs of students, that we have the tools to observe, assess and differentiate. There is a huge workload for teachers who are forced to differentiate for their students based on their intuition rather than with evidence-based tools. This represents working harder, not smarter.

Everything I learnt, I learnt on my own. My understanding from a recent report by the Grattan Institute is that this is still the case for many teachers in Australia, particularly in Victoria and the ACT, where the education systems have failed to respond to the unequivocal scientific evidence. Some teachers, some schools and some sectors are following research-based practice, but their voices are silent in this current debate on reading instruction. As a practicing teacher you cannot speak to the media.

I retired in 2018 and have been tutoring Canberran children who don't get the help they need at school. Using speech-to-print explicit instruction now recognised as how the brain learns to read, I have graduated over 200 children (some previously categorised as dyslexic, "on the spectrum" or with ADHD) as competent and confident readers.

I emphasise that the problem lies not with our teachers, all of whom want to do the best for their students, but with the university education facilities and the Education Directorate, which have failed them. When I first started tutoring, my students came in equal proportions from public schools and Catholic schools. Now almost all come from public schools because, three years ago, the less well-resourced Catholic education system aligned its teaching practices to the research.

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The ACT Education Directorate is currently undertaking an inquiry into literacy and numeracy with a focus on inequity. It is certainly not the case that it is just disadvantaged students who are struggling to learn to read, they just can't afford private tutoring to remediate against the flawed practices from the last century that continue to be used in Canberra's classrooms today.

I want to see a day when parents don't need to pay someone like me to tutor their children because every single school in Canberra is following the research and no more children fall through the gaps. That takes a system-wide change so that there are no conflicting messages, inadequate funding, insufficient coordination, inconsistent leadership, and poor use of data.