Published on August 16, 2024
Education in Australia often becomes a political football, and we have witnessed this over the last week. On Tuesday 13th August there was significant hype in the media regarding recent NAPLAN scores and the idea that they signal a crisis in teaching, funding and public education in Australia. At the time of writing this blogpost, the Northern Territory Government is the only one to sign The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement (2025 – 2034) as other states and territories do battle with the Federal Government over the terms of the agreement and most particularly the breakdown of funding for public education.
Over the last year, one of the most politicised debates in Australia has been about what is the “right” way to teach, with the implication that teachers have not quite been doing things the right way and this has resulted in poor NAPLAN results in low socio-economic areas. Just over a year ago in June 2023, the secretary of the NSW Education Department, Murat Dizdar called for a doubling down on explicit instruction to address the achievement gaps in education as evidenced through NAPLAN results. In addition, a National Reform Agreement Letter, signed by education experts and psychologists, called for a systemic approach to teaching literacy, based on The Science of Reading. Explicit instruction and the use of phonics to teach reading are key elements of the Science of Reading and the latter fits within a broader push to ensure practices in the classroom are evidence based.
For educators (including Principals) and parents the current debates about education, student performance and reform can seem fractious, despairing and complicated. After listening to the coverage about NAPLAN results this week, it is easy to become caught in the wave of urgency being generated in the media and to look for a quick fix. At an independent school such as HVGS, where our students consistently perform above average across reading, writing and numeracy in the NAPLAN tests, it is easy to dismiss some of these debates as not relevant to us.
However, the debate and the ensuing “calls for action” by political figures have implications for independent schools. It can lead to further debates about funding for non-Government schools (although it is important to clarify that schools are not funded by State and Federal governments, students are and AIS has developed great resources to explain this). It can also lead to additional pressures on our already overworked and highly competent teachers. Each new priority area or target from a government, in response to data such as NAPLAN, creates a burden for teachers and schools that, ironically, can take the focus away from the students we have in our classrooms right now and what they need as we work to comply with a new directive. It can also de-emphasise the art of teaching and de-value the capacity of our high-trained teachers to pivot their practices according to the needs of their students. We become focused on the debate, and the outcome of the debate, rather than celebrating the professionalism of teachers across education systems and supporting them in honing their craft.
A good example of this is the call to action around explicit instruction and the way in which it is described in opposition to inquiry-based learning. Recently Associate Professor Jane Hunter and Associate Professor Don Carter from UTS Sydney wrote that: “ teachers need to be able to use their professional judgement in the classroom. This is why some scholars argue we should see teaching as an art and not a precise science.” This was in response to what they described as a binary opposition being established by the NSW Department of Education between explicit instruction and inquiry learning. They were referring to a document published by the DOE that describes the essentials of a teacher’s craft. You can see the explicit teaching model below as it is represented by the NSW DoE. In relation to the statement about explicit instruction in new primary syllabuses, NSW Education Minister, Pru Carr stated that:
Any teacher worth their weight in gold applies the strategies noted in the model above. It is not new; it is what we expect from our teachers and the way in which they are trained to teach. Any teacher worth their weight in gold, though, also knows when to move between explicit instruction and either guided or independent inquiry.
The comments by Minister Carr and Mr Martin imply that our teachers will now be doing something different; that a new solution has arrived. In addition, the fierce debate in the media about explicit instruction has pitted it against inquiry-based learning. The NSW Education Department describes inquiry-based learning as an “education approach that focuses on investigation and problem-solving”. It is described in opposition to “traditional approaches”, such as explicit instruction.
I would argue that this is an unnecessary and inaccurate distinction to make that takes us away from what we should really be focusing on: enabling our teachers to celebrate the art of teaching, dig into their practice, reflect on their practice and feel highly valued in our communities. Our teachers don’t need to do more, they need to feel valued and heard. This involves ensuring our teachers feel supported as professionals who make 1000s of decisions each day in their classrooms about what teaching methodologies to use in response to the students in front of them. Sometimes, an open-ended inquiry can be a great starting point to spark student engagement in a new unit of work and to gather information about what they already know. In some classrooms, the maturity of the students means that only explicit instruction works! In those classrooms it is all about structure. At other moments, teachers generate multiple lessons for the one class to meet the readiness of each individual student.
As Hunter and Carter say in their article, current debates in NSW (and Australia more generally) about the “right way to teach” are reductive and take away from the complexity of teaching and decision-making in the classroom. Du Pleiss, Du Pleiss and Kung talk instead about the importance of:
It is this nuance, which our teachers at HVGS are so skilled at achieving. However, this incredible capacity of teachers is lost in current education debates in Australia. By losing this nuance and stating that it is only “now” that teachers have what they need, the implication is that up until now Australian teachers have not been teaching in the right way. It also implies that teachers need to do more, which in the end compounds teacher exhaustion and makes it hard to retain and recruit teachers.
By contrast, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we returned to those COVID times when we sang the praises of our extraordinary teachers! What I hope is that we can step away from the unhelpful media debates and instead let our teachers take a breath, reflect and continue to refine the art of teaching in their classrooms.
This is not to take away from the fact that we do have challenges ahead in our Australian public schools where some of our most disenfranchised young people are not meeting the essential literacy and numeracy benchmarks. The solutions to help these young people, though, are way more complex than a focus on explicit instruction and funding alone.
What should we be talking about in Australian education moving forward? We should be talking about the beautiful art of teaching. We should be talking about how we can honour our teachers and give them agency and autonomy so they feel empowered and trusted to make the right decisions in their classrooms. We should be talking about how to break down division and binaries of thinking, and build collaboration across DoE schools, independent schools and other school systems. We should not set up competition and angst around funding – pitting public and private education against each other – and instead be looking at sustainable ways to ensure high quality education across all schools. We should be talking about how we prepare our students for their future, which requires core literacy and numeracy but also so much more. Even as a child is learning to read, we should be sparking their curiosity, giving them the opportunity to inquire, question and thereby want to learn more.
We should be talking about the excitement of learning and education for the future. We should be talking about the fact that our people (in the age of AI) need to embrace lifelong learning like never before.
I hope that as the recent response to NAPLAN results dies down, our political leaders will step away from the politics and the quick fixes, and let schools get on with what we do best: preparing the young people for their complex but exciting futures.
