There are schools in Australia embracing the need for rigorous, systematic synthetic phonics provision.IT'S not making excuses, but there's a good chance that the juveniles who allegedly lit the fires that engulfed NSW last week have problems with reading.
The best predictor of juvenile delinquency is illiteracy. Being unable to read means you are disenfranchised from society and condemned to a life on the margins. Little wonder, with illiteracy entrenched among Australian youth, we are seeing angry youngsters who express their rage with a match - or, more often, by quietly committing suicide or spiralling into drug addiction. It is a problem that has vexed Rev Bill Crews since he first started burying the street kids who turned to his Ashfield Uniting Church for help in the 1990s. The common denominator was all had endured seven years of primary school without learning to read. Once they reached high school, they were lost.
If there is one way the state can make a difference in people's lives, irrespective of parental quality, it is by providing a good education. And the most important component of a good education is learning to read. From that, everything else flows.
Yet our education establishment continues wilfully to obstruct the systematic, phonics-based approach that all evidence has proved is the best way to teach children to read.
There is a pretence that phonics is incorporated into the system but it is the same lip service authorities give to bushfire hazard reduction. A little bit here and there which amounts to a pile of nothing.
Just as green ideology is behind the reluctance to prevent bushfires in the only way known to man so, too, is ideology behind the resistance against the teaching of phonics. How ideology infected reading instruction is explained in a brilliant new paper by researchers Jennifer Buckingham, Kevin Wheldall and Robyn Beaman Wheldall for the Centre for Independent Studies: "Why Jaydon can't read: the triumph of ideology over evidence in teaching reading".
However, of those schools, some are following the previous UK government's 'Letters and Sounds' publication which is really only a framework - not a full programme.
It does not provide teaching and learning resources or a full and proper bank of words, cumulative texts and a mnemonic system (aid to memory). This will lower the potential of the SSP approach as individual teachers try to turn Letters and Sounds into a body of work with the mindset that it 'is' a programme already.
Other schools in Australia are making progress with Jolly Phonics - but don't seem to appreciate that Jolly Phonics does not address requirements and provide age appropriate material for the seven to eleven year olds.
Some schools have discovered Phonics International and they are even working collaboratively with other schools to hone their knowledge and skills of using the programme.
The report written about a WA school on our PI homepage is testimony to the dedication and hard work of teachers at the school - particularly the author of the report, Jacqui O'Donnell who is now the principal of another WA primary school.
Jacqui O'Donnell's report when she was deputy principal at this WA school:
http://www.phonicsinternational.com/Pho ... cation.pdf
A colleague, John Walker, has also recently been in Australia delivering training in the Sounds-Write programme - a linguistic phonics programme with similar basic principles to systematic synthetic phonics.
The problem we all face as phonics programme authors and training providers, however, is that this is painstaking work which takes up a huge amount of time and energy - school by school - and when driving characters within schools move on, the rigour of the practices can change yet again rather than stay strong within the school.
Meanwhile, the clock ticks for the children themselves. They need this explicit and high-quality phonics teaching now - and it should not be 'pot luck' what they receive at school.
