Structured learning in Victoria

The ABC reports:

For most schools, it doesn’t get much better than seeing academic scores skyrocket.

At Upwey South Primary School, in Melbourne’s outer-eastern suburbs, that is exactly what has happened.

In the past six years, its NAPLAN results across the board have surged — in reading alone, scores lifted by a massive 70 points.

At the average NAPLAN result is around 400 so an increase of 70 is huge. That’s almost one standard deviation so would be like moving from the 16th to the 84th percentile or from the 84th to the 95th percentile.

Six years ago, the school decided to change the way it taught literacy, abandoning an approach known as “whole language”, or balanced literacy, popular on university campuses.

It switched to a more direct, evidence-based approach known as “structured literacy”.

The approach Erica Stanford has mandated.

Mr Kitch retrained the school’s teachers in direct, explicit instruction.

“And since we began … we’ve just seen huge positive results across the school, not just in academics for English but also in mathematics, in the culture of the school and in children’s engagement,” he said.

So this approach works for maths also, despite claims it doesn’t.

The teaching practices at Upwey South have now been adopted across all of Victoria’s public schools.

The move was opposed by teachers’ unions, but momentum has been growing — a number of private schools have started retraining teachers in explicit instruction, too.

Victoria has been covered by the Victorian Labor Party since 2014, so this happened under a Labor Party that isn’t beholden to local teacher unions.