By Pat Byrne
President, SSTUWA
26 February 2021
Children in our public school
system struggle with literacy for a range of reasons – anxiety, hunger, mental
health concerns, neglect – any of these factors can affect a child’s capacity
to learn.
The task of identifying and
managing the causes of learning difficulties can be complex, something which
the proposal to introduce a phonics test in Year 1 fails to recognise.
The State School Teachers’
Union of WA is strongly against introducing a national compulsory phonics test because the idea is
simplistic. Introducing a test of this nature does not in any way assist teachers to identify
the reasons children might be struggling or what is needed to address these
causes.
Stories in the West
Australian this week quoted prominent business people suggesting that
introducing the phonics test would “help stop kids leaving school with poor
reading skills”.
We fail to see how introducing
yet another test into the WA public school system, in and of itself, would help
anything. Tests don’t solve problems.
The most likely impact of
introducing a phonics test in Year 1 would be to create more administrative
work for teachers (taking them away from actual teaching) and more anxiety for
students.
You only need to look at the
introduction of NAPLAN to see how counterproductive compulsory testing can be.
What could have been a useful
tool in identifying students who needed extra help has instead become a burden
for teachers, students and parents. NAPLAN has become focused on league tables;
dominating school planning, staff selection and promotion, while at the same
time distracting teachers from genuine teaching and students from learning.
Phonics is already a
well-established teaching strategy within the WA Department of Education. The
department provides resources and guidelines to support a phonics approach and
all teachers working in the early phases of learning are familiar with phonics
as a learning tool.
All students already undergo an
on-entry assessment on commencing school. Teachers are professionals who know
their students; they are well aware of which children need additional assistance
with literacy and numeracy. What they need is more targeted support to provide
this assistance.
Since the staggering funding
cuts in 2013, there has been a significant reduction in system support for
teachers through the loss of specialist teachers such as Getting It Right
Literacy (GIRL) and Getting It Right Numeracy (GIRN) specialist teachers.
The SSTUWA has called for 500
new teachers over four years, and we believe that some of these need to be
literacy and numeracy specialists.
We also need our new teachers
to be the very best applicants.
In its election asks the SSTUWA
has noted that universities accept entrants to the teaching profession with
very basic ATAR scores – as low as 30 in some institutions! While the SSTUWA is
cognisant of the risks of making assumptions as to potential teaching capacity
based on ATAR scores alone, the fact remains that with such low ATAR entry
requirements, one of the consequences has been to contribute to a fall in the
status of the profession.
Australian Education Union
(AEU)/SSTUWA policy is to support the establishment of a minimum ATAR score of
70 for entry into Initial Teacher Education (ITE) courses in any Australian university.
The Literacy and Numeracy Test
for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE) students that is currently taken at the
end of a university teaching course is flawed for a number of reasons:
- It fails to serve as a tool for improvement.
- By conducting this test at the end of an individual’s ITE course it leads to the accrual of a HECS debt with uncertain prospects of being able to enter the profession at the conclusion of the course.
- It allows the university to attract government funding for students with reduced prospects of success.
The AEU/SSTUWA believes that it
is far more beneficial to ensure that minimum entrance standards are in place
prior to commencing ITE, with a rigorous support system to ensure that
beginning teachers are successful in their early years of teaching.
We need more teachers, we need
the best candidates for teaching positions and we need to retain the best
teachers to teach in smaller classes.
The SSTUWA also believes that
smaller class sizes and access to ancillary health/therapist services would go
a long way towards addressing issues with literacy.
What we need in our schools to improve literacy is more individual support; not more tests.
