A 49-year-old single mother who just wants to support her family but can’t find employment. An 80-year-old business owner whose wife has passed away and now must handle the books to keep the business afloat. A young father who just wants to be a good dad and read bedtime stories to his four-year-old daughter. All these people live separate lives, never once meeting each other, yet all sharing in the same daily struggle, one most of them have faced their whole life. 

The inability to read.

Why is this the case? What are the consequences these people face? What can be done?

The data

Reading is a skill Australians are increasingly losing the ability to do. According to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics 44 per cent (approximately 7.3 million) of Aussies have low literacy, where the reading standard ranges from primary school-level up to early high school. Thirty per cent of Australians did not read or listen to a book in 2024 and school kids are falling behind. The latest NAPLAN results revealed one in three students did not meet reading standards, with one in 10 students being identified as needing additional support in reading. 

Early literacy professor at Notre Dame University Dr Lorraine Hammond says the results reflect how reading is being taught in schools. She says the traditional way reading is taught doesn’t place enough emphasis on the role of spoken language and the understanding that words comprise of sounds. She says learning to read isn’t natural to the human brain with the English language being especially challenging for young learners due to the letters and letter combinations sometimes having more than one sound (e.g. “ea” in “heap” and “head”). “Early reading is hard slog, it’s like swimming through honey for children, it’s not easy at all. We just forget how difficult it was in the first place because we get really good at it,” she says.

A 2024 report from the Grattan Institute revealed students who struggle with reading are more likely to fall behind their classmates and drop out of school. “It’s kind of this Matthew Effect where the rich get richer or those who are kind of ahead just accumulate more skills and knowledge and those who are further behind just drop back even further,” says deputy program director of education at the Grattan Institute Amy Haywood.

Consequences of not being able to read

“It’s specific things where it does get a bit challenging like looking at a screen or a menu.”

Twenty-six-year-old Ashleigh Bertram was born with an intellectual disability that affects her ability to read. She was behind her classmates at school and was placed in support classes which offered one-on-one teaching where she felt supported and learnt more efficiently without the distractions of being in a bigger class. She was taught the same concepts as her peers but at a slower pace and in a different style of teaching which helped her understand the learning content.

After Bertram finished high school, she wanted to improve her English but found there were limited options for people with reading disabilities. She enrolled in a TAFE course but, with funding cuts to education assistants and courses specifically designed for students with disabilities, she found the environment didn’t support her and wasn’t used to working in a larger class. She began to fall behind and eventually dropped out after the workload became too much. 

She says having a reading disability is challenging. “My big goal is to be independent and do what everyone else is doing and having mum and dad allow me to look at things on my own and do more things on my own and to get less off them,” she says.

What can be done/what’s working

Haywood says almost all students can learn to read if they’re given the right instruction and are provided with catch up support if they’re behind. She says there needs to be a strong emphasis in the early years on phonemic awareness, phonics and exposure to rich literature read aloud in the classroom. Once that has been achieved, explicit teaching is then needed to build up a student’s vocabulary, fluency and background knowledge so they can then comprehend what they read.

Explicit instruction

Explicit instruction is a teaching method targeted towards novice learners which breaks learning components down into small digestible chunks, helping students to learn more effectively and to prevent cognitive overload. The learning technique comes from the research of Dr Barak Rosenshine who conducted studies in the 1960s to analyse links between behaviours of effective teachers and their students’ academic performance. The research found teachers with the best results spent more time reviewing previously learned concepts, checking whether students had understood concepts and correcting misconceptions during the lesson.

Notre Dame’s Hammond says explicit instruction is the most efficient way of teaching the human brain how to do something. “If you think about something you’re not great at, say you’re learning a new sport, having someone explain to you step by step what to do is way more effective than saying, there’s a hockey stick, off you go, figure out which end works best for you,” she says.

How it’s taught

Teachers follow a structured model starting each lesson with a daily review so they can check for student understanding of previously taught concepts and skills. Students use mini whiteboards instead of pen and paper and are given the opportunity to practice and ‘pair share’ with a partner while the teacher checks students are understanding the content.

Learning material is presented in small steps with the teacher explicitly explaining and modelling what they want students to be able to do, spending a significant amount of time giving students practice and feedback.

Examples and answers are provided to students by the teacher, removing the fear some students face when not having the right answer to a question with the class being taught at a faster pace to keep students engaged.

Students will then move onto independent work once they’re ready and fully understand the content they’re being taught.

The goal is students will master the concept they’re being taught and can then recall it automatically as it will have seeped into their long-term memory due to the repetitions they have built up.

What teachers think

East Kimberley College was a part of the Kimberley Schools Project in 2019; a program aimed at strengthening education outcomes for Aboriginal students in the Kimberley region. The program uses explicit instruction and teachers say they have seen positive results. 

East Kimberley College teacher Georgia McGee says teaching explicitly helps manage student behaviour. “I felt so much more effective as a teacher, I felt like the kids were grasping what I was trying to get across a lot quicker, and it was easy for them,” she says.

McGee says once students learn the routine of explicit instruction, they’re able to engage with the content because they know what to expect. She believes all teachers can learn to teach explicitly because there is a formula to follow which makes planning classes easier. “I feel as though you see progress a lot quicker compared to how I was teaching prior,” she says.

East Kimberley College secondary access teacher Libby Elphick teaches year seven and eight students. She says the use of whiteboards increases student engagement and removes the fear of not having the correct answer to a question. “Most kids, especially weak learners, will just switch straight off because it’s way too dangerous to try when you never get it right, whereas with this it’s almost like a game for them because everyone’s playing, we’re all answering together and we’re all writing on our whiteboard at the same time,” she says.

Warriapendi Primary School

Warriapendi Primary School is a public school based in Balga which teaches using explicit instruction. According to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 64 per cent of students at Warriapendi speak a language other than English at home. The school has an ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage) score of 956, a scale used in Australia to fairly compare NAPLAN results between schools with similar student backgrounds. The average ICSEA is 1000, with Warriapendi ranking in the 27 percentile, meaning they are more educationally disadvantaged than 73 per cent of schools in Australia.

Warriapendi ranked as one of WA’s most improved schools for NAPLAN in 2025, with their average reading scores for years three and five being significantly higher compared to WA public schools.

Warriapendi Primary School principal Matt Pinkard says the school has adapted the way they teach reading to reflect the latest research. “It’s not about right or wrong, it’s about what’s going to make a difference? What does science show makes a difference,” he says.

Pinkard says the explicit instruction model at the school has undergone change due to staff turnover and teaching approaches straying from the original model. He says the recent NAPLAN results reflect the shift the school has made to refining their approach.

Lindsay Weryck is a parent on Warriapendi’s school board with two children at the school. She says she noticed an improvement in her children’s focus and effectiveness in completing tasks after being taught explicitly. “I think it has very much sparked a love for reading because they’re able to do it independently and together with me,” she says.

Weryck’s children have always been taught explicitly, and she worries about the transition they will face once they reach high school and need to potentially adapt to a different teaching method. 

“If for some reason we were to leave Warriapendi I would actually seek a school that does explicit learning. I do wish this kind of style of education was around when I was at school because I feel it would have had a much bigger impact on my own learning style,” she says.

Pinkard says he wishes more schools would learn to teach explicitly and believes both play and explicit-based learning approaches can coexist. “The implications are enormous for us as a nation and for individual people. It’s just not nice for someone’s doors to be closed on them in life just because they’re unable to read and because they got less effective instruction,” he says.

Why reading matters

Read Write Now is a government-funded volunteer organisation which provides free one-on-one counselling to adults in need of literacy support. 

Read Write Now literacy training and support officer Eleonora Panaia has been a teacher for more than 40 years and tutors people with reading disabilities. She says while explicit instruction has shown it can be effective there needs to be complete buy-in from both students and teachers for it to be successful.

“I think the key is not only attendance but engagement so you can get kids to school but unless they’re ready to learn I don’t think it’s going to be very effective,” she says. 

During Panaia’s teaching career, she worked in programs such as Reading Recovery and specialised in one-on-one teaching.  She believes explicit instruction can work but says it needs consistency and strong classroom teaching which can then be reflected into real world examples.

Ashleigh Bertram reached out to Read Write Now two years ago and has just obtained her Construction White Card with the help of a tutor which has enabled her to gain employment at a construction site. She says the program provides her with much needed support and feels she has made progress in her reading. “Even though it’s going to take time, that’s fine, I’m on my own little path and hopefully I’ll get there and in time everything will have worked out,” she says.

Panaia says reading is an essential skill every person requires in life. 

“People have got really sad issues going on and are in crisis. Literacy really is a vehicle of freedom, it’s a gateway and if you don’t have it anymore on your own, that’s a crisis”

Eleonora Panaia