00:00 It's almost dinner time at the Bogart House and that means homework.
00:10 Twelve year old Zoe is a thriving student now, but in her younger years she struggled
00:14 to learn to read.
00:16 It was a little bit frustrating for me because no one was telling me how to do it or no one
00:22 was helping me understand what I was reading.
00:25 By year three Zoe was three years behind.
00:29 I do feel quite let down.
00:30 I put my trust into the teachers and into the public system and I've literally got no
00:36 result.
00:37 Noni found Zoe a tutor and moved her to a Canberra Catholic school.
00:42 There she was explicitly taught to sound out words instead of memorising or guessing them.
00:47 Zoe caught up within two years.
00:50 There's many what I would call instructional casualties which are kids that are failing
00:55 to learn to read, not because they can't but because they're not taught well enough.
01:00 More and more schools are moving to what's called structured explicit literacy where
01:04 children are taught letters and sounds in a particular order so they can decode unfamiliar
01:10 words.
01:11 Instead of using predictable readers which have been removed from the national curriculum,
01:16 it uses decodable readers.
01:18 Decodable readers promote guessing and there's lots of long words and tricky sounds.
01:27 A decodable reader promotes decoding and it has a restricted amount of letters and sounds
01:34 which the child has been practising.
01:37 We know that children who are effective readers early on are the ones who have acquired those
01:44 automatic decoding skills.
01:47 Professor Pamela Snow says there is huge variation in what schools are doing across the country.
01:52 It is a lottery unfortunately and parents don't know that they're signing up for a lottery
02:00 when they enrol their child at this school rather than that school.
02:04 Are you ready spaghetti?
02:06 Yes!
02:07 South Australian public schools started explicitly teaching phonics five years ago.
02:12 With the help of literacy coaches, the state's NAPLAN reading and phonics check results have
02:17 been steadily improving, especially among children from poorer backgrounds.
02:22 When we can see those results changing, that's always really good for teachers to be able
02:26 to go, "Oh, actually what you're telling me and what we're trying and doing here is actually
02:29 working for me and my students."
02:31 The big thing that I'm seeing in the children is confidence.
02:33 So when they come into our phonics lessons, because they're structured, they're explicit,
02:38 they have a routine and the kids know what to expect, they're all willing to have a go.
02:43 New South Wales and WA public schools also teach this way, while Tasmania and now Queensland
02:49 are committed to making a state-wide switch.
02:52 But the phonics first approach still has its critics.
02:56 I believe that a balanced approach works best because it allows the teacher to encompass
03:04 using a whole range of different strategies to meet the needs of the individual learner.
03:09 For Noni, there's no question what works best.
03:12 Her son Jagger was explicitly taught phonics from the beginning.
03:17 He's already nearly at a year two level in reading from doing his decodable readers.
03:22 Cracking the code for a fundamental skill for life.
03:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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