A huge advancement in official guidance in South Australia

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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A huge advancement in official guidance in South Australia

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

After 7 years of advocacy, Dr Sandra Marshall ( former President of Dyslexia SA, and now Chairperson of new Australian NFP " Code REaD Dyslexia Network") is thrilled to have received the following confirmed in writing from South Australia's Education Department's Chief Executive Mr Rick Persse:
Principals from schools with Year 1 enrollments and Year 1 teachers administering the Phonics Screening Check are required to attend face-to-face training on the administration of the Check.

The sessions are being well received and participant feedback has been extremely positive so far.

The Phonics Screening Check training recommends that schools integrate decodable readers into the teaching of Synthetic Phonics to consolidate a child's phonic knowledge.

Based on current evidence, the Department of Education expects that all schools teach beginning and struggling readers using approaches that incorporate the use of synthetic phonics and decodable readers.

The Department will continue to deliver a strong message to principals and schools about the need for decodable readers to support our young learners to become more self-reliant readers.

The Department does not support the use of the Levelled Literacy Intervention program and Education Directors have been advised of this.

Code REaD is now advocating in Australia's other states and territories to ensure that this leadership occurs nationally.
We are very fortunate in England to have received official guidance about the provision of 'systematic synthetic phonics' and the 'need for decodable readers' to support beginners but perhaps the most important and hugely significant part of this latest directive is this line:
The Department does not support the use of the Levelled Literacy Intervention program and Education Directors have been advised of this.
We are urgently in need of this same kind of official directive in England from the Department for Education with regard to the persistence, and continuation, of the Reading Recovery programme including all its underlying training based on multi-cueing word-guessing and its lack of commitment to systematic and rigorous phonics provision.

Many schools in England do not provide cumulative, decodable reading books for beginners and slower-to-learn children despite the official guidance in England about their benefits.
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