A group of leading literacy experts has called for an urgent overhaul of reading instruction to lift the skills of 1 million struggling students in an open letter to education ministers.
The experts say the next National School Reform Agreement should embed evidence-based approaches to the teaching of reading to improve literacy for the one-in-three Australian students who are not meeting national proficiency benchmarks.
La Trobe University professor of cognitive psychology Pamela Snow said it was "morally reprehensible" that states and territories had not adopted the recommendations from the 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, which was prompted by a similar open letter.
"We can't be back in the same position in 20 years' time and have lost another couple of decades of ground when it comes to students' potential and life chances. We, the adults, have to make adult decisions about how to best apply the best available scientific evidence," Prof Snow said.
"We need to have a collective will that places the needs of students above the ego needs and ideologies of adults."
The signatories, which include Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow Prof Anne Castles and economist Saul Eslake, recommend six reforms to embed approaches based on robust evidence at scale.
The letter calls for an ambitious but achievable target to be set with the understanding 95 per cent of students can reach reading benchmarks when supported by high-quality instruction.
It says evidence-based approaches need to be embedded in teaching degrees and training for in-service teachers and also need to be included in teacher accreditation standards.
The letter also calls for an outline of what evidence-based practice actually is and for all states and territories to implement a year 1 phonics check and screening in the first year of high school.
Lastly, it calls for students who fall behind to have access to timely support to help them catch up, including small group instruction and intensive one-on-one support.
The letter comes after the ACT missed its 2022 targets for narrowing the gap in reading and numeracy NAPLAN scores for advantaged and disadvantaged students.
Prof Snow said there had been a failure to translate scientific knowledge about how children learn to read into the classroom and there was too much variability between classrooms.
"Reading ... has been unfortunately, a very contested part of the early school years in spite of the fact that it's been a very closely studied aspect of child development and there's a lot of robust evidence about what the reading process is and how best to teach in ways that ensure success for the vast majority of students," she said.
Prof Snow co-founded La Trobe University's SOLAR Lab, which has trained 10,000 teachers in three years through short courses on the science of reading.
"It's transformational for how they think about the children in their classroom and their instructional practices and they're taking away knowledge that they can and do employ straight away in their classrooms," she said.
"But this is not knowledge that they're graduating from university with and it's not knowledge that's necessarily privileged at a policy level, at a sector level."
Prof Snow said if a student did not learn key literacy skills in the first three years at school, it sets them back for the rest of their life.
"It means you're at risk across the lifespan of social and economic marginalisation, of mental health problems, potential involvement with the justice system, reliance on public housing," she said.
"There are a number of public health imperatives that trace back ironically to reading proficiency."
The open letter was drafted with the support of the Snow Foundation.
It echoes calls from Canberra advocacy group called the ACT Alliance for Evidence-Based Education for the ACT government to invest in system-wide changes to reading instruction.
Some jurisdictions, such as South Australia and NSW, have already made changes to their education policies to bring evidence-based instruction to classrooms.
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