‘Well off the pace’: Grattan expert slams weak student improvement targets

Policymakers need to get serious about shifting the dial on our stagnating learning outcomes, with Australia ‘well off the pace’ set by the world’s best education systems like those of Singapore and England.

So says the Institute’s education program deputy Amy Haywood and director Dr Jordana Hunter, who also contend our teachers are being let down by ‘embarrassingly inadequate’ professional learning opportunities to hone their practice, compared to those offered to educators in high-performing countries.

Under the new Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, states and territories have signed on to lift the proportion of students meeting NAPLAN proficiency benchmarks for reading and numeracy by 10 per cent by 2030.

But Haywood says the improvement targets are ‘really a floor rather than a ceiling’ and risk letting some governments off the hook.  

“One thing that worries us is just the way that they’re calculated … the jurisdictions where we actually, ideally want them to make the quickest improvement, like somewhere like the Northern Territory, their percentage improvement that they’re required (to hit) in those targets is actually less than somewhere that’s already a bit higher, like the ACT.

“So, we wouldn’t want to bake in that difference in terms of expectations for what we can achieve over the life of the agreement.”

The latest NAPLAN data shows that almost 40 per cent of students in both the NT and Queensland are below proficiency benchmarks in reading and numeracy, while in the NT this is nudging 60 per cent.  

The experts note that if we look at the case of the NT, its 2030 target will be met if it manages to get just four extra students out of every 100 to proficiency.

For the ACT, it will mean ushering an extra seven students in every 100 over the line.

It’s clear that more ambitious targets are needed if we want a strong system-wide response to improving teaching and learning, Haywood indicates.

“It also means that if we care particularly about these foundational skills – something like literacy is a foundational skill for so many other things in the curriculum, and that we want kids to experience in schools – [bolder targets] ensure we’re clear-eyed about what is really important and it doesn’t fall down the priority list…”

Former secondary teacher Amy Haywood says when it comes to providing guidance and instructional support for teachers, a much more ‘hands-on’ approach from governments is needed to shift the dial on student achievement at scale. 

Pamela Snow, Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Psychology at La Trobe University, has called out the widespread complacency around NAPLAN results.

Snow has urged those ‘upstream of NAPLAN data’ to stand up and ‘be part of the solution’ to our lack of overall improvement over the past decade and the persistent low-performance of 10-25 per cent of students.

 “…education academics and policymakers need to be part of the solution, by ending the excuses and blame-shifting and showing moral courage and commitment to meaningful and translational change in every classroom – not just the ones where a lucky golden ticket happens to have landed,” she writes in a blog post.

“It would be awful if we didn’t know what to do about this predicament.

“But it is worse that we DO know what to do, and wilfully choose not to take action at scale?” Snow poses.

Schools with students whose NAPLAN results flags them as in need of additional support face two related but different challenges, Snow outlines in the post:

• “They need to provide targeted support, without delay, based on high-quality assessment tools, to students whose skills are so far behind that they cannot possibly be keeping up across the curriculum. This support needs to be highly organised, delivered by knowledgeable staff, and sustained over a long period of time to ensure that genuine catch-up occurs. We’re not looking for false dawns.
• “They need to review their mainstream classroom instruction so that they are not producing instructional casualties – children who could be successful readers but are not, because they have not been exposed to high-quality instruction and support.”

“If 30 per cent of the planes manufactured by Boeing reliably fell out of the sky, with regular and predictable mass casualties, the outcry by government, media, and the public would be deafening,” she writes.

“Why do we not care in the same way about children’s educations?”

According to Haywood, when it comes to providing practical guidance and instructional support for teachers, a much more ‘hands-on’ approach from governments is needed to get real traction at scale from here.

Yet some commentators have argued that too much government interference over what happens in classrooms strips teachers of their professionalism and hinders their ability to serve their students’ needs.

Haywood says having a shared approach to evidence-based instruction across a school actually bolsters teacher professionalism and expertise across the board.

When teachers are given explicit direction about what this looks like, everything changes for the better, she suggests.

“We’ve been lucky to work with a lot of schools, particularly case study schools in Australia but also internationally, and … where they’ve got this shared approach to whole school systematic maths teaching (for example), it actually improves the professional experience that they have in the school.

“It means that they have this shared understanding of ‘here’s the best way to do our job to use our minutes in the classroom’ and ‘here’s the best way to support our students’ and it actually means they can then share the load in a way that’s much easier,” Haywood says.

Variance in instructional approaches from one classroom to the next means teachers can’t properly engage in conversations about the nitty-gritty of their practice, Haywood adds.

“If you really want to use something like a mini whiteboard to get students responses, and have a really fast way of seeing where they are up to and ‘have they gotten something so we can move on’, unless you’re both using that method you can’t have a very granular conversation about it.”

And having governments back the best instructional strategies to be used in schools still allows for ‘a lot of room for that professional conversation on the ground’, Haywood concludes.