# Is Australia failing to teach kids to read?

An episode of [7am](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1461999702), 29 Aug 2026, 14 min.

Audio: https://p.podderapp.com/2544644999/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/2fb3740d-3436-44af-8cc0-a91900716aa5/62723a1f-3e96-4fc4-882c-b25e0181da4d/ad3175d4-4dd6-42ea-b308-b4b4005bca92/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=70f29d90-2a63-48aa-bf8f-b25e0181da70

The latest NAPLAN results show around a third of Australian students are still falling short in literacy and numeracy – results that have barely budged since 2023. At the same time, Australia is settling a decades-long fight over how children should be taught to read. For years, many schools relied on outdated methods that encouraged children to work out words using context, pictures and other cues. Now, some classrooms are increasingly moving towards phonics and explicit instruction. But the evidence for that approach has been around for decades. So why is it taking so long for classrooms to catch up? Today, journalist Martin McKenzie-Murray on why the old methods lasted for so long, and how children should actually be taught to read. This episode was first published in August 2024. If you enjoy 7am, the best way you can support us is by making a contribution at 7ampodcast.com.au/support. Socials: Stay in touch with us on Instagram Guest: Associate editor of The Saturday Paper, Martin McKenzie-Murray Photo: AAP Image/Dan Peled See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to 7am. The latest
[0:10] Speaker 1: NAPLAN results show around a third of Australian students are
[0:13] Speaker 1: still falling short in literacy and numeracy, results that have
[0:16] Speaker 1: barely budged since 2023. At the same time, Australia has
[0:20] Speaker 1: been settling a decades-long fight over how children should be
[0:24] Speaker 1: taught to read. For years, many schools relied on outdated
[0:27] Speaker 1: methods and encouraged children to work out words using context,
[0:30] Speaker 1: pictures and other cues. Now, some classrooms are increasingly moving
[0:34] Speaker 1: towards phonics and explicit instruction. But the evidence of that
[0:38] Speaker 1: approach has been around for decades. So why is it
[0:40] Speaker 1: taking so long for classrooms to catch up? Today, we
[0:44] Speaker 1: revisit our conversation with Martin McKenzie-Murray on why the old
[0:47] Speaker 1: methods lasted for so long and how children should actually
[0:51] Speaker 1: be taught to read. It's Sunday, August 30. This episode
[1:00] Speaker 1: was originally published in August 2024.
[1:04] Speaker 2: So, Marty, your daughter has recently started school. Tell me,
[1:08] Speaker 2: when you were trying to decide where to send her,
[1:12] Speaker 2: what kinds of things were you weighing up and what
[1:14] Speaker 2: did you notice about the way that schools were communicating
[1:18] Speaker 2: their ethos?
[1:20] Speaker 3: I live in a state, Victoria, that has long preferred
[1:23] Speaker 3: school autonomy and And so there exist all these kind
[1:27] Speaker 3: of differences in teaching philosophy between schools, which I was
[1:31] Speaker 3: largely kind of ignorant of. And I think the kind
[1:35] Speaker 3: of ideological differences and ideological commitments of certain schools, principals
[1:40] Speaker 3: and teachers is obscured by a lot of wishy-washy language.
[1:45] Speaker 3: So in reading stuff like child-centered learning, you know, my
[1:49] Speaker 3: eyes would have kind of glazed over previously, but I
[1:52] Speaker 3: now realize that that phrase itself is like, really significant
[1:57] Speaker 3: and kind of conceals or maybe announces in its funny
[1:59] Speaker 3: way this very particular ideology.
[2:02] Speaker 2: Okay, so what is the child-centered approach? What does that mean?
[2:07] Speaker 3: It really comes down to what was once called whole
[2:10] Speaker 3: language and it kind of mutated into what's now known
[2:14] Speaker 3: as balanced literacy.
[2:15] Speaker 4: A character a little better about how they're feeling in
[2:18] Speaker 4: a story. And we can infer how a character is
[2:21] Speaker 4: feeling three ways in a story. We can infer how
[2:23] Speaker 4: a character is feeling everyone by what they look like, what.
[2:26] Speaker 5: They say, and how they act.
[2:30] Speaker 4: When we do that, we have our emoji posters behind us,
[2:33] Speaker 4: and our emojis help us to understand our characters a
[2:36] Speaker 4: little bit better.
[2:40] Speaker 3: So I think it was popularized in the late 1960s
[2:43] Speaker 3: in the United States And like many kind of ideological fashions,
[2:48] Speaker 3: Australia followed and was very much born of the zeitgeist
[2:51] Speaker 3: at the time. By that, I mean this suspicion of
[2:55] Speaker 3: authority that children should be empowered and acceptance that children
[2:59] Speaker 3: have their own inner lives, their own emotional lives, that
[3:01] Speaker 3: they might learn differently and at their own time.
[3:05] Speaker 6: And that should be deferred to.
[3:06] Speaker 4: Right.
[3:07] Speaker 3: So this is another story about those characters.
[3:09] Speaker 1: So we know Kate's name is going to start with
[3:11] Speaker 1: a what?
[3:12] Speaker 3: Kate.
[3:13] Speaker 2: And Nick's name is going to start with.
[3:15] Speaker 4: A capital N because it's a name.
[3:17] Speaker 6: And James.
[3:19] Speaker 3: James. So say Kate. Practically, whole language sought to immerse children,
[3:25] Speaker 3: just immerse children in reading, in words, in language. You
[3:29] Speaker 3: surround them by beautiful books. You read to them often.
[3:32] Speaker 3: And they would acquire it as easily and naturally as speaking.
[3:41] Speaker 2: Right, OK, so that sounds kind of nice and intuitive,
[3:44] Speaker 2: this idea that children can learn to read in an
[3:47] Speaker 2: organic way. Tell me, Marty, about the proponents of whole
[3:51] Speaker 2: language and how they justify its teaching.
[3:54] Speaker 6: There's two of them, Irene Fountas and Gaye Sue Pennell.
[3:57] Speaker 7: And I know from working with children who found... literacy
[4:01] Speaker 7: learning very difficult, that for some children, they can focus
[4:05] Speaker 7: on learning about letters, sounds, and words out of context,
[4:09] Speaker 7: but there's a wall and they don't connect what they've
[4:12] Speaker 7: learned to what they're reading or what they're writing. So
[4:15] Speaker 7: we feel that as teachers, we need to break down
[4:18] Speaker 7: that wall. Kids need to know why they're learning what
[4:21] Speaker 7: they're learning about letters, sounds.
[4:22] Speaker 2: And words.
[4:23] Speaker 3: Let me read for you their own defense. This is
[4:27] Speaker 3: from 2021. They said the goal for the reader is
[4:30] Speaker 3: accuracy using all sources of information simultaneously. So they're referring
[4:34] Speaker 3: to these cues, like visual cues. They go on to
[4:37] Speaker 3: say if a reader says pony for horse because of
[4:40] Speaker 3: information from the pictures, that tells the teacher that the
[4:43] Speaker 3: reader is using meaning information from the pictures as well
[4:47] Speaker 3: as the structure of the language. But he's neglecting to
[4:50] Speaker 3: use the visual information of the print. His response is
[4:53] Speaker 3: partially correct.
[4:54] Speaker 2: But it's not a... Pony, it's a horse. Or the
[4:57] Speaker 2: other way around.
[4:58] Speaker 6: Yes, Ruby, exactly.
[4:59] Speaker 3: And to say about this hypothetical student that it said
[5:02] Speaker 3: pony instead of horse, it is a bizarre generosity to
[5:05] Speaker 3: say that that is partially correct. I would say, and
[5:09] Speaker 3: plenty of others would say, it's not partially correct and
[5:12] Speaker 3: there's no such thing as partially correct.
[5:13] Speaker 6: It's just simply wrong.
[5:16] Speaker 3: Okay.
[5:17] Speaker 2: So it's less about accuracy and more about vibes.
[5:22] Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. But the problem with that is... Explicit instruction
[5:27] Speaker 3: and systematic instruction about the fundamentals of reading was eroded
[5:32] Speaker 3: in favor of or in preference for more romantic assumptions
[5:37] Speaker 3: about children's learning. But as cognitive scientists, linguists, speech pathologists
[5:42] Speaker 3: have been asserting for decades now, regarding the acquisition of reading,
[5:46] Speaker 3: regarding the development of literacy, we all have the same
[5:49] Speaker 3: brain structure and we require learning. explicit instruction to acquire
[5:54] Speaker 3: that reading. Increasingly, I think really loudly and vociferously, cognitive
[5:59] Speaker 3: scientists are saying vibes-based literacy teaching has to be replaced
[6:05] Speaker 3: with something systematic. That is the explicit instruction of phonics,
[6:10] Speaker 3: and that is teaching children to decode words by learning
[6:14] Speaker 3: the correspondence between certain letters and their sounds.
[6:18] Speaker 2: So that's the sound A and the letter A, the
[6:21] Speaker 2: triangle with the line through it.
[6:23] Speaker 6: That's it, yes. Or sh is made by S and
[6:27] Speaker 6: H together.
[6:27] Speaker 2: Okay, so Maddy, how is it then that we got
[6:31] Speaker 2: into this situation where a method that is supposed to
[6:34] Speaker 2: teach children how to read, it doesn't work or it
[6:38] Speaker 2: doesn't work well, but nevertheless it's taught in schools?
[6:42] Speaker 6: Yeah, well, it's become highly politicized.
[6:44] Speaker 3: And somewhere along the line, I think the teaching of phonics,
[6:47] Speaker 3: explicit instruction, empowering the teacher and not the students or
[6:51] Speaker 3: the children, it became coded as a conservative thing. There
[6:55] Speaker 3: was a suspicion of rote learning. It might bore or
[6:58] Speaker 3: dispirit students. And I should say like a very famous
[7:02] Speaker 3: proponent of phonics teaching was George W.
[7:06] Speaker 2: Bush.
[7:06] Speaker 8: There is one area where the teaching research is definitive.
[7:11] Speaker 8: The best way to teach children to read is phonics.
[7:16] Speaker 3: And when he was running for office in 2000, a
[7:19] Speaker 3: very prominent feature of the Republican platform that year was phonics,
[7:24] Speaker 3: offering very, very large sums, grants to schools that adopted
[7:27] Speaker 3: a federally approved plan for phonics.
[7:30] Speaker 8: No new theory or method has ever improved on it,
[7:34] Speaker 8: as the people of this great state know better than anyone.
[7:37] Speaker 8: The National Institutions of Health... And the kind of rigorous
[7:41] Speaker 8: research we need has proven that phonics works and that
[7:45] Speaker 8: children can learn to read much earlier than we have assumed.
[7:50] Speaker 3: So there's been for a long time this kind of
[7:52] Speaker 3: ideological resistance to it.
[7:57] Speaker 2: After the break, the children and teachers who've been failed. So, Marty,
[8:12] Speaker 2: we've been talking about this long-running ideological debate about how
[8:16] Speaker 2: to teach children how to read. Let's speak about how
[8:20] Speaker 2: it's affected teachers, the people who are actually on the
[8:23] Speaker 2: front lines of this issue.
[8:25] Speaker 3: One of the people I spoke to for this article
[8:28] Speaker 3: is Sue Highland, who is a teacher, an instructional coach,
[8:32] Speaker 3: and she's also an associate lecturer in education at La
[8:36] Speaker 3: Trobe University here in Melbourne. And she said a lot
[8:40] Speaker 3: of things that were interesting. One thing that really struck
[8:42] Speaker 3: me was her sort of painful discovery when she was
[8:46] Speaker 3: learning how to become a teacher. She was buzzing with enthusiasm.
[8:52] Speaker 3: She was really optimistic. She goes in to teach prep
[8:55] Speaker 3: and year ones. And she realizes this giant hole in
[9:01] Speaker 3: her own education. No one had taught her this basic
[9:04] Speaker 3: fundamental thing, how to teach children how to read. And
[9:09] Speaker 3: so this was a painful discovery, and she used the
[9:11] Speaker 3: word grief. She said for three years she was teaching
[9:14] Speaker 3: whole language method, and she came to the painful realization
[9:17] Speaker 3: that she was not doing the best by her own students.
[9:21] Speaker 3: She's also angry, and she tells me that there are
[9:23] Speaker 3: other teachers who are angry as well. They're saying, why
[9:26] Speaker 3: weren't we taught this? Why weren't we made aware of alternatives?
[9:31] Speaker 3: We didn't know what we didn't know. Mm-hmm.
[9:34] Speaker 2: Okay, so you've got teachers coming to this realisation that
[9:37] Speaker 2: they may have failed children who they were supposed to help.
[9:40] Speaker 2: But what about the children who went through school and
[9:43] Speaker 2: learned under this method? Obviously, many of them did learn
[9:46] Speaker 2: how to read, but how many didn't? Who are the
[9:49] Speaker 2: children who were failed?
[9:51] Speaker 3: I mean, the metaphor that I've used is that, like,
[9:54] Speaker 3: some kids will learn to swim if you throw them
[9:56] Speaker 3: into a swimming pool, but also many will drown. Those
[10:00] Speaker 3: whose families couldn't afford tutoring, private tuition that might make
[10:06] Speaker 3: up for or mitigate the inadequacies of their formal education,
[10:11] Speaker 3: And those who weren't born to educated parents, whose parents might,
[10:15] Speaker 3: you know, their educated attentions might help mitigate the failures
[10:19] Speaker 3: of their education. Kids who aren't surrounded by books, kids
[10:23] Speaker 3: whose parents aren't reading to them. So those poorer students,
[10:28] Speaker 3: either materially or environmentally poorer, were more vulnerable to the
[10:32] Speaker 3: inadequacies of whole language because it wasn't being mitigated by
[10:36] Speaker 3: other things.
[10:37] Speaker 6: And this is a very haunting thing.
[10:39] Speaker 3: Like time and time and time again, teachers told me
[10:42] Speaker 3: children were not given the basics, were not given explicit
[10:47] Speaker 3: instruction in the basic fundamentals of reading, and as such, struggled. Now,
[10:53] Speaker 3: as children, that struggle manifests quite despairingly. If you struggle
[10:59] Speaker 3: as a child, you can feel shame, inadequacy, and it
[11:03] Speaker 3: becomes aversive. You start avoiding the things that causes that shame.
[11:09] Speaker 3: And time and time and time again, teachers told me
[11:11] Speaker 3: that they encountered or knew of students that were diagnosed
[11:16] Speaker 3: with learning disorders when in fact the fault lay with
[11:20] Speaker 3: the education. The student wasn't at fault. They weren't lazy.
[11:26] Speaker 3: They were abandoned. They were not taught properly. Now, if
[11:31] Speaker 3: these things are kind of grounded early, like a sense
[11:34] Speaker 3: of shame, a sense of inadequacy, and ultimately avoidance of reading,
[11:40] Speaker 3: that lingers.
[11:41] Speaker 6: That can be lifelong.
[11:43] Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's what's so sad about this story
[11:45] Speaker 2: in a lot of ways. It's this well-intentioned but ineffective
[11:50] Speaker 2: policy that's ultimately led to more inequality.
[11:54] Speaker 3: I think so, yeah, and that's the sort of perversity
[11:56] Speaker 3: of it, is that there were these very grandiose romantic
[11:59] Speaker 3: assumptions about children, about their development, about their cognitive architecture...
[12:04] Speaker 3: about empowering students and respecting their idiosyncrasies and individualism, all
[12:09] Speaker 3: made in good faith.
[12:10] Speaker 6: But ultimately, I think it's harmed and compounded illiteracy.
[12:15] Speaker 2: Marty, thank you so much for your time.
[12:18] Speaker 6: Thank you.
[12:31] Speaker 1: 7am, we'll be back tomorrow with a very special episode
[12:33] Speaker 1: featuring Anthony Scaramucci. The Mooch spent just 11 days in
[12:37] Speaker 1: Donald Trump's White House, but he helped sell Trump to America.
[12:41] Speaker 5: The president has really good karma, okay? And the world
[12:44] Speaker 5: turns back to him. He's genuinely a wonderful human being.
[12:49] Speaker 1: Now he says backing Trump is one of the biggest
[12:51] Speaker 1: regrets of his life. And he's got this free advice
[12:53] Speaker 1: for Australia in how to deal with the president. Play hardball.
[12:58] Speaker 6: That's the only way.
[12:59] Speaker 5: There's no other way to handle him. That is, there's
[13:02] Speaker 5: one way to handle Donald Trump, and you have to
[13:05] Speaker 5: push and shove him, and you have to apply maximum pain.
[13:08] Speaker 5: And Mark Carney understands that. His approval rating is probably
[13:11] Speaker 5: like 70% right now. So I would tell your colleagues
[13:13] Speaker 5: down there, pick up the phone, make Mark Carney your
[13:17] Speaker 5: life coach, and have Albanese talk to him. Do not
[13:21] Speaker 5: kiss Trump's ass, because that'll be a recipe for disaster forever.
[13:26] Speaker 5: as it has proven time and time again.
[13:28] Speaker 1: That'll be in your feed tomorrow. I'm Daniel James. Thanks
[13:32] Speaker 1: for listening.

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