The teaching change this school made that supercharged its students' reading skills

Switching to a style of teaching reading known as ‘structured literacy’ was a game changer for Churchill Primary. (ABC News: Patrick Stone)

A reading revolution at a small, disadvantaged public school in regional Victoria could provide the blueprint for turning around alarming literacy rates in Australia’s 10,000 primary schools.

Churchill Primary, about two hours south-east of Melbourne, has the twice the number of students in the lowest socio educational advantage bracket as the national average.

In 2016, almost half of Churchill’s year 3 students and 65 per cent of year 5 students did not meet national minimum standards in reading.

In 2018, it adopted a new teaching style, and today, every single student at Churchill Primary meets or exceeds the minimum standards.

“I wish I had had this training at uni,” said year 5 teacher Halie McColl.

“For the first 10 years of my teaching career I feel like I’ve failed the kids because I wasn’t teaching them to read how they should’ve been taught to read.”

The game changing move for the school was switching to a style of teaching known as ‘structured literacy’, which is anchored in phonics and involves breaking all the key components of reading into lessons taught explicitly to students.

The results have transformed classroom life.

“The most exciting thing about this new approach is the results we’ve got for the kids,” said principal Jacqui Burrows.

“They’re performing much higher academically, but the kids are more engaged and teachers are enjoying teaching more.”

‘Not left to flounder’ 

The new approach replaced a teaching method called ‘whole learning’, a style sitting on the other side of the long-running “reading wars”.

While whole learning became dominant on university campuses in the 1970s, major inquiries in Australia, the United Kingdom and United States across recent years have found it’s no longer best practice.

“[Structured literacy] is based on research … so I think that’s why its successful at Churchill,” Ms Burrows said

To make the change, Ms Burrows retrained all her teachers and noticed immediately that behaviour improved at the school, too.

“Now the kids aren’t left to discover things on their own. They’re not left to flounder,” she said.

“They’re actually taught explicitly everything they need to know.”

Shifting the dial

A report by The Grattan Institute released earlier this week concluded one third of Australian students were failing to learn to read proficiently through the whole language approach.

Grattan said that was a “preventable tragedy” coming at a cost to the Australian economy of $40 billion, with students unable to read proficiently more likely to become disruptive at school and unemployed or even jailed later in life.

The think tank said all school systems should move toward structured literacy.

“Teaching in the classroom is the most important in-school factor. The quality of teaching is the thing that will shift the dial for our young people,” said Grattan education program director Jordana Hunter.

“We need to make the most of every single minute we have with our young people.”

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has said the science on teaching reading has been settled and teaching styles could be mandated in the upcoming school funding agreement.

Having seen the benefits of structured literacy firsthand, Halie McColl said she was confident it could work in any school.

Her only concern was for her peers who were failed by the ideas of the past.

“I know lots of kids from my school that struggled with reading and that approach. Those kids might not have dropped out of school,” she said.

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