Education policy: some international perspectives

What's going on in the world?

At No More Marking, we're based in the UK, but we run English-language writing assessments in a number of different countries.

There are some interesting cross-national trends in education at the moment in favour of the science of learning, phonics instruction and knowledge-rich curriculums.

In this post I'll do a quick survey of what's happening in various parts of the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

Australia

Last week, the Victoria state government announced they were mandating systematic synthetic phonics for the teaching of reading.

This followed on from a big federal reform to teacher education. In May 2022, a new federal Labor government was elected in Australia, and one of the first actions of the new Education minister, Jason Clare, was to appoint an expert panel on teacher education. They published a report in June 2023 with recommended Core Content for teacher education courses that is heavily influenced by science of learning research.

United Kingdom

We have a general election coming up next month: Labour are expected to win a big majority, so there's a lot of attention on their manifesto. It’s very positive about phonics teaching, and points out correctly that phonics is not a Conservative invention. It was a Labour government in 2005 who commissioned the seminal Rose Review into the teaching of early reading, and this in turn laid the foundations for many of the Conservative phonics policies of 2010-2024. The Labour manifesto also has warm words for teachers working on knowledge-rich curriculums.

Education is a devolved matter in the UK, and within the UK nations there are also some interesting stories.

I've written about some of the problems with Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence on this Substack before. Northern Ireland and Wales have shown signs of being influenced by the CfE, but that appears to be changing. Northern Ireland commissioned an independent review of their education system in 2021. I particularly recommend reading pages 114-118, which conclude with the following.

The curriculum must rest on a proper understanding of how people learn. Progressively building up educational capital is fundamental. That has to involve the acquisition of knowledge (including practical knowledge) and its commitment to long-term memory. The learner has to be assisted to translate knowledge into understanding and to be able to apply that understanding.

In Wales, many teachers and academics are pushing back on aspects of the new Welsh curriculum which were inspired by the Scottish CfE. This excellent video from Lucy Crehan explains the problems.

If you want an outsider's perspective on the education system in the UK and Ireland, then last month Jen Buckingham, Research Director at Multilit in Australia, published a fascinating comparison of how England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland teach children to read.

America

In the US, one of the biggest education stories of the past few years has been the huge success of Emily Hanford's Sold a Story podcast, about the problems with "balanced literacy" reading approaches and the strengths of phonics teaching. It's had a significant impact in the US and has led to a number of school districts changing their textbooks and teaching approaches.

New Zealand

After New Zealand’s 2023 election, one of the first acts of the new education minister, Erica Stanford, was to create a ministerial advisory group on the curriculum. Their report was published in March and includes some important sections on why our new understanding of the science of learning requires changes to the curriculum. I recommend this section from page 30.

In the early 2000s, there was a prevailing belief that by examining how experts think and operate, we could distill their strategies into teachable modules for novices, thereby fast-tracking their journey towards expertise. This assumption rests on the notion that expertise is simply a matter of adopting expert-like thinking patterns.

We now understand that expertise is not merely a collection of strategies, but rather a result of a prolonged and deliberate process of knowledge accumulation and cognitive schema formation…In simpler terms, the belief that we can directly teach students (novice learners) to solve problems with the same flexibility and creativity as experts is misguided. That approach fails to recognize that flexibility and creativity are founded upon structured knowledge stored in long-term memory as well-organized schemas.

Canada

In 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Commission published a report on teaching reading which flagged up weaknesses in the teaching of reading. One paragraph is worth quoting in full.

Despite their importance, foundational word-reading skills have not been effectively targeted in Ontario’s education system. They have been largely overlooked in favour of an almost exclusive focus on contextual word-reading strategies and on socio-cultural perspectives on literacy. These are not substitutes for developing strong early word-reading skills in all students. The OHRC’s position is that making sure all children are taught the necessary skills to read words fluently and accurately furthers and does not detract from equity, anti-racism and anti-oppression.

The current Ontario government are looking to turn this report into practice.

Four important conclusions

1. Problems with skills-based curriculums

Many of the countries / jurisdictions above have experimented with skills-based curriculums and are now realising that they do not work. Very different people - teachers, parents, politicians, journalists - from very different education systems are all independently acknowledging a similar problem. The major theoretical flaw with skills-based curriculums is their resistance to breaking down skills into smaller chunks. Typically, I find there are two specific areas where this theoretical flaw rapidly causes real practical problems: early reading and classroom assessment.

2. Early reading

One of the most important jobs of any education system is teaching students to read their native language. Systematic synthetic phonics is a highly effective method of teaching students to read English. It relies on breaking down the complex skill of reading into smaller chunks. By contrast, approaches which don’t break things down, like balanced literacy and whole-word teaching, are not as effective.

3. Progression statements

Another big practical way that skills-based curriculums fail is by setting up very bureaucratic and time-consuming assessment systems that require teachers to assess students against very vague progression statements like “can make insightful inferences about a variety of texts”. Again, these progression statements do not break complex skills down into useful and workable sub-units. It has been so fascinating for us at No More Marking to see the way that very different education systems with very different policy structures all tend to end up creating something like these progression statements - and that teachers all end up complaining about them for the same reasons: they are unhelpful and time-consuming.

When you apply progression statements to the teaching of early reading, you get particularly bad problems. The primary teacher and author Christopher Such has a great post explaining why.

4. Knowledge isn’t right-wing

One other striking commonality is that many of these reforms are bipartisan. People sometimes want to assume that explicit instruction, knowledge-rich curriculums and the science of learning are part of a dark fascist plot, but this is just transparently not the case. Labour governments in Australia and the UK are in favour of phonics. The Ontario Human Rights Commission is not typically associated with right-wing positions. Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast was produced by public radio in the US. Ultimately, skills-based curriculums are a wrong turning in educational history, and people from across the world and across the political spectrum are waking up to that fact and trying to fix the problem.