Why the drop-off in performance after Year 3?

Sue Napier MP
Shadow Minister for Education
Saturday September 12, 2009

Why the drop-off in performance after Year 3?

· Why the drop off in literacy and numeracy performance after Grade 3?

· After 11 long years of Labor, literacy and numeracy standards in high schools continue to miss the mark

· We must find out why students’ literacy and numeracy levels are falling relative to other states after Grade 3

One of the many questions arising from yesterday’s disappointing NAPLAN literacy and numeracy results is why student performance goes backwards relative to national levels after Year 3.

The NAPLAN Summary Report on Achievements on Reading, Writing, Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation and Numeracy showed that after 11 years of Labor, the government still isn’t providing our students with acceptable outcomes in education.

Literacy and numeracy standards in High Schools continue to miss even the national average.

Why is it that Grade 3 students who did well in previous years fall back relative to other states?

Any child who fails to reach these minimal standards should be receiving intensive one to one or small group special assistance to help them at least get the basic tools for learning. No child should be leaving High School without at least minimal national standards of literacy and numeracy.

That will just add to the already low levels of adult literacy that we know exists within the Tasmanian community, which the Bartlett government has failed to strategically address. It has taken him over 12 months to even appoint adult literacy volunteer coordinators, and then he appoints people who are not even trained in adult literacy.

We also need to make sure that there are enough speech pathologists and school psychologists to find out why children are not becoming literate and numerate. Many learning disabilities go undetected, misunderstood, and act as a recipe for students giving up on learning.

Year 7 students performed below the national average in reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy. For example, only 88.6% of Year 7 students in Tasmania performed at or above the national minimum standard for writing, well below the national average of 92.5%.

And although Year 9 students scored above the national average in reading last year, students performed below the national average in all areas this year.

Only 83.6% of Tasmanian Year 9 students performed at or above the national minimum standard for writing, well below the national average of 87.7%.

The Government must seriously improve High School programs, provide better access to technical and trades education, more personalised learning programs that engage and motivate students to achieve their best before they are lost in the system, and programs to reconnect young people who have dropped out.

Instead, it has experimented on Tasmanian students with the bungled Essential Learnings shake up, which had to be scrapped and the disastrous Tasmania Tomorrow changes, recently referred to as the ‘big bang’ approach, which will take decades to untangle and fails to recognise that the problems with levels of qualifications achieved in that age group are developed well before Year 11.

We also have to remember that the minimum standard is just that – a minimum – and whilst the performance of primary school students is welcoming, we cannot afford to get over-excited. There is still much work to be done, particularly to assist those students who are falling behind.

A Hodgman Liberal Government would invest more in teachers, support students and remove the barriers to education that currently exist. This is the way to deliver the education system that will deliver results for Tasmanians.

W: www.willhodgman.com.au

Sue Napier