media & events

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

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.

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Sydney Morning Herald Interview, February 1, 2022, By Jordan Baker

Nathaniel Swain, a teacher and speech pathologist, said he struggled to hear quieter students when they wore masks. “Quieter kids will also tend to hide behind the mask and not want to speak up and find it difficult and muffled,” he said.

“Students with [English as second language] backgrounds are not as expressive as they might have been without the masks on.” Some struggle to understand. “They need to see the face and the mouth and piece that together with the acoustic information,” he said.

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Sydney Morning Herald Interview, January 31, 2022, By Lisa Visentin

Nathaniel Swain, a teacher at Brandon Park Primary in Melbourne, said he’d noticed an increase in recent years in the scope of teachers’ responsibilities and the number of administrative tasks they were required to do, with the stress driving some out of the profession. He said his school was in the process of implementing a plan to tackle burnout by creating shared resources and curriculum materials, which would be ready by the end of the year.

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