Minister signals curriculum changes

Sydney Morning Herald Interview, February 5, 2022, By Jordan Baker and Adam Carey

Excerpt from Sydney Morning Herald

The proposed national curriculum also reinforces the primacy of phonics in teaching young primary school students to read, a development that could place pressure on Victoria to follow NSW’s recent cue and move away from its dominant method of balanced literacy.

Nathaniel Swain, a speech pathologist and primary school teacher at Brandon Park Primary in Melbourne’s south-east, said the current Victorian curriculum has “mixed messages around how we want early readers to decipher text. They have phonics in there, and they have some of the foundations in there, but they have a whole lot of other stuff thrown in there as well,” Dr Swain said.

Brandon Park diverges from the Victorian curriculum in that it emphasises synthetic phonics – which teaches children the 44 sounds in the English language and the letter combinations that make them – over balanced literacy, where students are taught to memorise whole words and learn phonics while reading stories.