“We had a really positive response to the report, and especially from schools and teachers and school sectors saying, ‘yes, we want to do this – where is the tool?’” the former teacher and now senior research associate at The Centre for Independent Studies, tells EducationHQ.

“And of course … we didn’t actually have one for Australia.”

Opting to wade into the thick of it, Norris has since been leading the development of a Year 1 numeracy screener which she says is on track to be available for all schools next year.

The initiative is being run as a research project, she says, ensuring the end product is rigorously aligned to the evidence.

“We want to make sure that the items that we're using in this screener are as accurate as they possibly can be in identifying the children that we want to target.

“So, those children who are actually going to go on to struggle, rather than just making a judgment about what we think might be important,” Norris explains.

Interest on the ground has been strong, she reports, with around 100 schools already signed up to trial the work-in-progress tool this year.

“We’ve been really excited to get approval from a lot of school sectors.

“We’ve had departments of education, but also quite a number of Catholic dioceses have approved the research, and we have independent schools on board as well – and from most states,” Norris says.

Last year the educator warned that too many Australian students are condemned to maths failure because of the system’s ‘wait to fail approach’, which does not identify their learning struggles early enough.

While great strides had been made in literacy with the introduction of a national Phonics Screening Check to identify those students at risk of falling behind in reading, there was no equivalent screening for early numeracy skills that was widely or effectively used, Norris flagged.

“I think numeracy always lags behind literacy to some degree.

“We’ve seen that in the research, as well as in the rollout of good tools and good intervention programs.

“But we are very lucky, in that I feel that literacy has blazed a trail for us in showing us what sorts of tools we need, what sorts of interventions can work – so it’s now time to apply what we’ve learned in literacy to numeracy, which is equally important in predicting children’s success both at school and also in life.”

Norris says the charge to develop the screener has been elevated by the support of a team of international and local experts, including Professor Rebecca Bull from Macquarie University, who has assisted “very heavily” in the project design.

“She is the lead of Australia’s only numerical cognition laboratory, so we’re really lucky to have her expertise on the team.

“And we also are working with Auspeld who are working very hard to translate all the wonderful work that they’ve done in literacy difficulties into the numeracy space as well…”

The opportunity to develop a viable national numeracy screener is not lost on Norris.

“To be quite honest … it’s recently become fashionable because of the Better and Fairer Report and the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, but it's been something that I’ve been wanting to do for probably 15, maybe 20, years.

“So, to have the opportunity to be doing it now is very exciting…”

This year researchers will be busily collecting critical data from schools involved.  

“We’ll have a beginning of year, middle of year and end of year data collection, so that we can be sure that the tool that we’re using, and the probes within the tool, are doing what we need them to do.

“And so that we can get feedback from teachers about how easy and pleasant and simple the tool is to administer, and how children are responding to it,” Norris says.

Every element of the screener will be scrutinised along the way, she indicates.

“We’ll be able to see which items are working well, and which ones don’t, because we are expecting that we will be pruning down the tool a lot over the course of collecting the data.

“We want it to be efficient, so anything that’s not pulling out its weight will be cut.”

The stakes, ambitions and workloads are high, and Norris admits that at times during the project she’s jokingly lamented ‘me and my bright ideas’.

But this is exactly the work she’s been after.

“I am an early childhood teacher. I did my post-grad study, my research project, on early maths intervention and screening, and I have a child myself with a mathematical disability which was not picked up by existing practices.

“There’s a lot of personal and professional involvement for me,” she says.

The numeracy screener will hone in on three key components of ‘number sense’, which Norris says are known to predict children’s future success in maths. These involve:

  • Number - which covers understanding about number symbols and non-symbolic representations (such as dots), the ability to count items accurately, and read, write and say numbers. It also includes early understandings about the properties of numbers, such as place value.
  • Number relations - which refers to understanding the magnitude of numbers. It includes knowledge of sequence and the use of a ‘mental number line’ which enables students to compare numbers in terms of their magnitude and to have an accurate sense of where they sit on a number line in relation to other numbers (more than/less than/half way/closer to etc).
  •  Number operations - which involves understanding and knowledge about addition and subtraction, as well as the operations in terms of combining, separating and adding to sets, understanding that numbers are comprised of other numbers, and knowledge about the composition of small numbers (eg. 9 as 4 and 5 or 14 as 10 and 4).

Schools interested in joining the project can contact the research team here.