Early numeracy screening research
Funding blame games and the light at the end of the tunnel
A couple of weeks ago, we learned that Victoria and South Australia - have successfully twisted federal Education Minister Jason Clare’s arm into providing ‘full’ funding to schools in the next funding agreement.
"This is real funding tied to real reforms to help students catch up, keep up and finish school," Education Minister Jason Clare said.
"It's not a blank cheque. I want this money to get results."
If you’re a normal person who has not been following intergovernmental argy-bargy over school funding for the past decade or so, ‘full’ funding is classified as as 25% federal funding to state schools, with the balance to be funded by state governments. This is up from the 22.5% Clare firmly stuck to throughout 2024 - which WA, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT agreed to - and the 20% agreed to by the previous federal government.
It’s a quirk of our federation that the federal government in Canberra has pretty much all revenue-raising powers while states retain constitutional responsibility for certain pricey service delivery, namely health and education. In other words, we have a blame game:
Canberra wants to see improved outcomes for the sizeable bags of cash they hand over (because voters judge them on economic managements), but have limited means of doing so, as they do not run schools, employ teachers, etc.
The states’ incentives are to
demandrequest more money to (nominally) improve the quality of services (because voters judge them on the quality of services), because they have limited means of raising their own revenue efficiently.
It’s been a bipartisan mission across the life of the funding agreements (the previous National School Reform Agreement and the present Better and Fairer Schools Agreement) to link ‘funding to outcomes’, outcomes which are agreed to by all parties.
Given the NSRA showed a limited (to put it kindly) ability for high-level reform agreements to effect change where it is needed to lift outcomes - that is, the school and classroom level - some scepticism about the fine print of this new version is warranted.
‘Real reforms’
But in the spirit of optimism, let’s zoom in on one reform in particular that has the ability to make a real change: the “development of an early years of schooling numeracy check.”
Similar in purpose (if not in form) to the Phonics Screening Check, this numeracy check for Foundation and/or Year 1 students would be an efficient, universal tool, appropriate for use with Australian curricula, that flags students at risk of developing mathematics difficulties.
What a good idea! Wouldn’t it be nice if we had one of those?
Good news, friends: that is exactly what my colleagues have been working on: a research project to road-test what a screening tool that meets the above criteria could look like in Australian schools.
Here’s a snapshot of which school systems have given approval for this research to go ahead in their schools:
Approvals current as at 6/2/25. For a live version of this table, click here.
Learn more about numeracy screening and this project from Kelly:
Interested? What to do next
The first testing window is coming up later in Term 1, 2025. Learn more about what’s involved here.
It’s a condition of the project’s Human Research Ethics approval that schools can’t enrol themselves in the project; informed consent must be provided by the principal upon receiving detailed information. By filling in this form, we can provide you with the what you need to enrol - it only takes a minute or so to complete.
PS: My colleague, Glenn Fahey, will be speaking about this project in Sydney at Sharing Best Practice on 22 March, hosted at the incredible Marsden Road Public School.