Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Few investments we make are more important than the investments we make in education. We have a responsibility to ensure that we're passing on the best of our knowledge to younger generations and that we're equipping them for whatever endeavours they'll undertake and also to contribute in meaningful ways to the life of the Australia we know and love.

There are two matters that I want to raise today. One area that should concern those of us in this building particularly is education relating to civics and citizenship. This is about more than just teaching people how to vote; it's about helping people understand how Australia was founded and the rules and framework around how we're governed. Too many Australians don't know we have a constitution, let alone what the Constitution contains. We should be concerned by the results in the latest National Assessment Program for Civics and Citizenship released in 2017. Just 38 per cent of year 10 students were at a proficient standard in their civics and citizenship knowledge. For a country that has compulsory voting this is very concerning. If citizens do not know what their citizenship confers and what rules guide, shape and limit the power of our parliament, their ability to make well-informed decisions and uphold that constitution into the future is weakened.

This is tragic because the Constitution belongs not to lawyers or academics or any other group, but to all Australians. The Australian Constitution sets the rules about how we're governed. No Prime Minister and no government can rewrite those rules without the permission of the people. The way we have organised our political life takes the wisdom of other democracies formed before us, but it is a uniquely Australian document that gives us a safe and stable form of government.

The second matter I want to raise as an area of concern is phonics education for our young Australians who are learning to read. Again, our standardised testing in Australia has shown that literacy standards are not what they should be. There's a large amount of well-established research that's shown this over the years: a person needs to be immersed in oral language, they need to be read or spoken to, but they also need to crack the code for how letters and sounds work together.

As Georgina Perry, executive officer of SPELD NSW, said: 'Learning to read is like learning to ride a bike or learning to swim. Students need explicit instructions and lots of opportunities for practice. Learning phonics skills is an essential part of students learning to read.' Some children will crack the code for themselves. They'll piece together how sounds, language and letters work without having it explicitly taught to them, but many will not. It's important that we're able to identify early on those children who are not grasping those steps and for whom reading is therefore becoming an obstacle instead of a gateway.

I've heard of too many stories of young people who reach high school in Australia having somehow missed learning one of the most important things they should have grasped in their early years of schooling. They've turned up to school each day and cleverly copied other students or hidden their inability to read. They reach late high school often having behavioural problems or a high level of anxiety because their whole learning has been compromised by missing out on those tools in their earliest years. We need to identify early on the students who are not acquiring the reading tools they need so that it can be remedied before the consequences for that person become severe.

In England the phonics screening check has been in place since 2011. The screening test allows teachers to identify the children who might need some extra support in learning to read. It's a non-threatening, simple test that gives important information to schools. The phonics check in England has been coupled with mandatory phonics teaching in schools, and the results show that over a three-year period the proportion of students reaching the expected standard has increased from 58 per cent to 77 per cent.

In 2017 the South Australian government trialled a year 1 phonics test, and the evaluation showed some important things. Firstly, the trial showed that students in that state are not learning phonics adequately. Only 15 per cent of the children in the South Australian trial reached the level of competence that 81 per cent of children in the UK reached. In the evaluation of that trial, teachers and school leaders said that students did more poorly than expected. This is helpful information for teachers to know what they need to focus more time on in their classrooms. It was encouraging to discover that students were positive about and engaged in the tests. They weren't anxious or stressed out. Similarly, teachers were largely positive, finding the data useful and the resources very helpful. I'll quote again from Georgina Perry: 'The phonics check is a valuable tool as it helps teachers confirm their students are learning essential phonics skills and may help identify those students who are having difficulty learning to read.'

Minister, given the importance of civics and phonics education and the room for improvement we have in both of these areas, can you outline how the government is investing in improving civics and phonics education in this year's federal budget?

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