Four steps to help fix Australian children's reading problems

Equity Economics was commissioned by the Code REaD Dyslexia Network to investigate why children aren't learning to read.

We identified four key areas of reform requiring an investment of $942 million in 2023-24; a fraction of the costs associated with underperforming in literacy.

The key to lifting literacy rates is to ensure all children are taught to read well. The bad news is that not all schools in Australia are following the evidence when it comes to teaching children how to read. Some schools are using techniques which create "instructional casualties" - children who should have become proficient readers but who didn't because they weren't taught well enough.

Getting rid of these flawed practices requires a shift akin to the death of Blockbuster video. Schools need to get rid of outdated materials.

There are great curriculum products available which have been proven to lift literacy outcomes for students. Some are free and others come at a cost. They all require training for teachers.

Equity Economics looked at Canberra Catholic schools, which have instituted a system-wide reform, backed by a big investment in high-quality curriculum materials and teacher training. Our research found that in 2019 Catholic schools were underperforming compared to similar students in the rest of the country. Four years later they turned these results around going:

$139 million is required to roll out similar materials for use nation-wide.

What, you might ask, is a decodable reader? Many parents will remember the painful books that schools send home when their children are first learning to read. These books can either be decodable, in that they require a child to learn the written code that letters and sounds make, or they can be predictable and encourage a child to guess a word based on cues (like pictures).

The Australian curriculum has been updated to require all schools to acquire decodable readers, which is fine except decodable readers cost a lot of money.

For this reason, the NSW government invested $4.3 million in decodable readers in 2021 so that cost wouldn't be a barrier to acquiring the books children need when they are learning to read. We estimate that a national investment of $40 million is required for decodable readers.

Currently, schools in Australia have a wait to fail approach. A child needs to have fallen well behind their peers before they might be offered some kind of support, and it is generally provided when it is too late to be effective and cost-efficient.

A much smarter approach is to look for the indicators that a child will struggle with reading early, before they fail. There are great screening tools to do this.

Best practice would be to start screening in early childhood centres, and then screen them while they are learning to read in the first three critical years at primary school.

At a minimum, a year 1 phonics check needs to be rolled out nationally to make sure children have the basic skills needed to learn to read. Students need to be re-screened on commencement to high school. This will cost an estimated $137 million.

Once we know which kids are struggling, we need to help them through small group tutoring so they can catch up to the rest of the class. This is the largest cost, coming in at $491 million.

The Australian government is negotiating school funding agreements with each state and territory. Securing funding is important, but so is what it is spent on. We will get better bang for our buck if schools are required to invest in evidence-based approaches. And with a $40 billion price tag for poor literacy, we can't afford not to.