The Australian Educational Research Organisation (AERO) has put forward a multi-tiered support system to help high school students, who are without foundational literacy and numeracy skills, catch up to their actual grade level.
Its intervention strategies are based on going “back to basics” or explicit teaching methods. This includes phonics and vocabulary building for literacy, and use of visual models, and guided practice for numeracy.
“Without support, these students will struggle to engage in their schooling and are at greater risk of not completing Year 12 and having their lifelong opportunities limited,” authors Zid Mancenido, Dan Carr, and Kate de Bruin said.
While most students start Year 7 sufficiently prepared and able to participate, a significant number—particularly male students and those from equity groups—need additional support throughout high school.
Struggling students tend to seek support from their friends and manage to “get by” before they begin falling through the cracks.
Some teachers noted that a lot of parents seek tutoring to help get their kids in Years 11 and 12 to catch back up. But by this time, they warn it is too late.
What the Teachers Are Saying
In a survey of 382 teachers by the Australian Council for Educational Research, many high school teachers expressed concerns that they lacked the skills to teach basic level literacy and numeracy concepts that are covered in primary school.“We teach Pythagoras, or we teach Algebra, I’m all good with that. But how do I teach a kid to count? I don’t know. How do I do that?” a teacher said.
In the interviews, educators highlighted the influence that literacy had on all other subject areas, including maths, science, history, arts, and geography.
Many teachers in these other subject areas found it difficult to engage with struggling students when they lacked basic English skills.
“It becomes even more difficult because the curriculum is quite a content heavy in the area of history and geography, economics, civics—that whole area tends to be quite literacy-heavy, and those students tend to struggle,” one teacher wrote in the survey.
Lacking literacy skills also severely impacts numeracy capabilities, which is particularly pronounced with students that have English as a second language.
“We’ve got a lot of Sudanese kids and a lot of Pacific Islander kids. So, we’re identifying a lot of English words or terminologies that were being used in numeracy that was actually foreign to them,” another teacher said, adding that they had changed their maths teaching to reflect the students’ lower literacy standards.
Explaining why maths was important to students was identified as an important factor to increase their engagement with the subject.
“We actually go in, and we explain to them why maths is important. Everyone goes, ‘Why do I need maths?’ So, we actually go through that process ... We tell them they need to be at a certain level for their own life skills to be able to buy a car, buy a house, getting change from the canteen, whatever it may be,” a teacher said.
Disengagement and a lack of resilience is also significant problem in Years 8 and 9 when learning literacy, which was made worse by online learning propagated during COVID-19.
Many teachers noted that students refused to put in any effort to write on a particular topic, instead just copying answers off the internet.
“They will Google the question, and then they will hope that the answer gets fed back to them, and then they will just put that answer down,” they said.
“It is a different ball game for some of these kids who can’t even put a sentence together.”
AERO chief executive, Jenny Donovan, said it was vital that every level of government worked with high schools in every state and territory to provide remedial programs.
