A case for change in Victoria
My opening statement to the Upper House inquiry into the state education system
The below remarks, lightly edited for clarity, were delivered to a May 9th hearing for the parliamentary inquiry into the state’s education system currently taking place in Victoria. The remarks touch on themes I discussed at greater length in my submission to the same inquiry from October 2023, which you can find on the parliament’s website here.
The Centre for Independent Studies is an independent non-partisan think-tank based in Sydney, but I myself am based in Victoria. The CIS is funded through donations, does no commissioned research and receives no government funding.
The Education program's focus is on producing research work to help inform policymakers and practitioners and, by doing so, improve the quality of education in Australia. Participating in inquiries such as this is a huge part of that work and I am grateful to the committee for this invitation.
To explain my professional background, I've been in education for about a decade, both policy and teaching, including three years teaching at a public high school in regional Victoria.
My submission is broad and long, so I will briefly mention some key developments that have taken place since I wrote it.
The policy landscape is changing around us. There is a growing appetite - from all sides of politics and from different school sectors - for being more prescriptive about what is taught in schools (curriculum) and how it is taught (pedagogy), due to a growing recognition that this is a significant factor influencing student outcomes.
The first example is the recent federal Better and Fairer review, which has made recommendations around embedding evidence-based teaching, assessment and educational supports into the next government funding agreement.
Furthermore, explicit teaching across the curriculum has been made a system-wide priority by the Catholic systems of Canberra-Goulburn, Tasmania and here in Melbourne. More recently the NSW Department of Education published research based on internal data to support their move towards explicit instruction, and now NSW is also reviewing its syllabus to focus more curriculum detail to complement this shift in pedagogy.
Another area of policy convergence is early reading instruction. Stronger system mandates on early reading have involved rejecting the philosophy of balanced literacy in favour of structured literacy, which involves systematic and explicit teaching of the 'big six' factors of early reading instruction.
As I mention in my submission, South Australia, New South Wales, and Tasmania have all made the shift. Since the submission was written, Queensland and ACT have also progressed in this area. All have rejected the vestiges of balanced literacy, committed to implementing structured literacy and a full Year 1 Phonics Screening Check.
What this means is that Victoria virtually stands alone in not having fully embraced structured literacy.
However, Victoria can learn much from the ACT's recent independent inquiry into literacy and numeracy, which was established with bipartisan support. The panel's report is titled Achieving equity and excellence through evidence-informed consistency. Victoria should adopt a similar mission.
Like Victoria, the ACT has a very autonomous school system and boasts high average NAPLAN outcomes, but these averages hide pockets of under-achievement for particular student groups.
Also like Victoria, ACT educational outcomes are not what we would expect to see given, first, the funding increase of the past decade and, second, the general level of socio-educational advantage relative to other jurisdictions. Many target equity groups are underserved and this was the impetus for the inquiry.
Just last week, the Victorian Auditor General released a report showing similar outcomes in Victoria. That report concluded "Since 2012, literacy and numeracy outcomes for Victorian government school students overall are stable" and "The department is not improving outcomes for Aboriginal students and students experiencing disadvantage. Since 2012, the proportion of these students below the expected level has been stable or increased."
Victoria has always used the language of evidence-based practice. But a commitment to school-based curriculum and pedagogy implementation, combined with a lack of transparency around education research and evaluation, has meant schools are left to go it alone in terms of figuring out what will work best.
This has consequences for staff and students. The quality of learning programs for students is left more to chance and dependent on which school they happen to attend, which has been acknowledged by the VCAA.1 In addition, leaving huge decision-making around curriculum and pedagogy solely to schools also has significant workload implications for teachers, particularly those earlier in their career.
In page 9 of the ‘Revised curriculum planning and reporting guidelines for F-10’, the VCAA states school-based curriculum design “has not always been accompanied by a sufficient level of advice and support to schools to enable the development of system-wide high-quality teaching and learning programs.”
This is great! And so needed.