More than a slogan: The state of Victoria’s literacy education
This piece was researched and written on Wadawurrung land. I acknowledge the Wadawurrung people, who educated and cared for Country for thousands of years.
Victorians drive around the country with “The Education State” on their number plates.
The slogan comes from the Andrews Government’s 2015 Education policy, so it is only about a decade old. The belief behind it goes back much further, and it deserves more scrutiny, especially with the recent VGSA negotiations and issues arising from it.
From a colonial perspective, Victoria did bring something new to the land with its system of education with The 1872 Education Act. This made Victoria the first Australian colony to offer free, secular and compulsory education.
First Nations peoples had been teaching, learning, trading, farming, and passing on knowledge across the place the colony called “Victoria” for many thousands of years before.
This piece follows the system that grew from 1872 because of its reach in shaping the lives of nearly everyone in this state and its influence on schooling across Australia.
In particular, I will look at literacy, reading and writing and the way our understanding of it has shifted, and lay out how it has been taught, why shifts occurred, who it was for, and who was left out. It will however be more about laying out the practice and pedagogical journey, with the ideology as background.
The wider social and cultural effects deserve deeper study for another time, but they can’t be separated from this story so will be acknowledged while not the central focus.
I also want to acknowledge one thing that drove me to write this. The job has inflated, beyond where it was when I started teaching just after The Education State promise, though I knew the change started much earlier. I wanted to understand what came before in literacy, only one part of the job which has increased the demand on time, resources, skills, and expectations of educators.
How we got here
Before 1872:
Before the Act, schooling was inconsistent and was not formalised.
Most children in Victoria attended government-aided schools, others went to independent or church schools, and a few were taught at home by tutors or homeschooled.
Because schooling was neither free nor compulsory, some children received no formal education at all.
From 1848, the National School Board and the Denominational School Board (for church parish schools) ran schools side by side. The National model came from Ireland, where that system was founded in 1831. Victoria separated from New South Wales in 1851 but kept these boards, then merged them between 1862 and 1872 into “common schools”.
The Irish system first shaped what Victorian children read, and how they practised writing. The Irish National Readers were the most commonly used and were Christian in moral teaching, but avoided ideological specifics, although they were perceived to be Catholic.
These readers were more than simply reading books. They were used to teach spelling, dictation, vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension, and writing skills were built into the texts.
The books also, of course, embedded the imperialist ideology and served the political function of a narrative of British dominance through dispossession forced onto Aboriginals and compliance required of the colonial subjects.
Historians of the Queen’s University Belfast collection describe the readers as “education operat[ing] as a dual-purpose mechanism: its pedagogic function standardised language, literacy, and structured knowledge.”
The geography books described the inhabitants of “New Holland” in degrading terms. Aboriginal children in these schools learned to read and write from books that demeaned them.
While the concerns of the First peoples of the colonies were not considered, in 1869 the Victorian Board of Education complained instead that the readers referred to a different hemisphere and had not expanded much beyond Great Britain.
Revised editions were then produced in 1871 for Australia. They were superficial and added short pieces on kangaroos, snakes, and stories of the “discovery” of Australia.
1872: the state takes responsibility for literacy
The 1872 Act created a centralised education department that also ran teacher recruitment and training. It separated secular settings from religious instruction, funded the system, and mandated that children aged 6 to 15 attend.
The state accepted responsibility for every child’s literacy, not only for children of families who could pay, were also educated, or who had a church behind them.
The texts used to form a literate Victoria changed as well. The Royal Reader series, introduced in 1877, became the main reading series. It offered a non-denominational religious education and a focus on literacy and moral values, and ran from an Infant Reader and Royal Primer through to Reader 6.
It continued tradition in leaning heavily on British history and expansion, though later editions included some Australian history, flora and fauna. Reading reached beyond the classroom sets as well: the School Paper ran from 1896 to 1969 and reached students in Victorian schools from Class III and reflected local settings more.
Handwriting
For much of the nineteenth, and far into the twentieth centuries, handwriting in Victorian schools was taught as a matter of letter formation, uniformity and penmanship, not as text composition in terms or ideas or structure.
Students progressed from slates and slate pencils to pen, ink and copybooks, where they repeatedly copied prescribed models of letters and words. The aim was not simply to write, but to reproduce an accepted style with consistent size, shape, spacing, slope, and joins.
Earlier handwriting models were influenced by formal scripts such as Copperplate (below).
Over time, handwriting instruction shifted towards simpler, more practical forms designed for speed and fluency. This development eventually led to Victorian Modern Cursive (below), developed in 1985 by educational psychologist Murray Evely. VMC is a standardised style designed to make letter formation and joining more efficient for school children, based on natural writing patterns.
The emphasis has since moved away from reproducing a perfect script towards developing legible, fluent, and more individual handwriting. Victorian Modern Cursive therefore represents part of a broader shift from disciplined imitation towards functional and personal written expression.
Grammar
Grammar has its own history within Victorian literacy education, and it is a history of considerable change.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, grammar was generally treated as a body of rules to be learned and memorised. The emphasis was on identifying parts of speech, correcting errors, and learning the conventions of what was considered “correct” English. This approach reflected a broader belief that formal knowledge of language produced disciplined thinking and better writing. It also reflected the linguistic values of the colonial education system. The English language was a standard to be mastered.
The 1872 Education Act included grammar among the subjects required in the curriculum, alongside reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. Contemporary records show that grammar formed part of the standard against which children could be considered “sufficiently educated”. Therefore, its significance is in it placing grammar as part of the core of the state’s original literacy project. Learning to write meant children were expected to learn the rules governing how those words should be organised.
This formal approach was falling out of favour by the middle of the century. The Victorian Education Department’s 1955 English course reduced the emphasis on formal grammar and placed greater importance on spoken English, communication, and the use of language in context. Grammar was not abandoned altogether; instead, it was increasingly described as something that should help children communicate more effectively, beyond reciting the rules. The 1955 course described grammar as something that could serve as “sign-posts” towards better expression, with sentence structures and word characteristics understood in relation to communication.
This shift gathered pace during the 1960s and 1970s. Across other English-speaking education systems, traditional grammar came under increasing criticism. Students had often spent considerable time parsing sentences, categorising, and memorising rules, yet research had not established that this kind of decontextualised grammar instruction necessarily contributed to developing better writers. Traditional grammar was consequently reduced or removed from many English curricula. In Australia, formal grammar teaching declined substantially from the late 1960s, as educators moved towards approaches that emphasised language as communication, creativity, and use rather than language as a set of rules.
As always, schools were influenced by the society around them. Post-war Australia was changing rapidly. Migration was reshaping and diversifying communities, youth culture was challenging established authority, and ideas about individuality, self-expression, and social equality were becoming increasingly influential. In this context, teaching English as a fixed set of rules could seem increasingly disconnected from the ways people actually used language.
The classroom began to shift from asking, “Is this writing grammatically correct?” towards questions such as “What is this person trying to communicate?”, “Who is the audience?”, and “How does language create meaning?”
This did not mean that grammar disappeared from Australian classrooms (as grammar is part of how meaning is made, of course) or indeed it was no longer important to the English language. Rather, it became less visible or identifiable as a discrete body of knowledge and more often was embedded within reading, writing, and communication learning. The emphasis had moved from knowing the rules to using language effectively.
The problem was that, although explicit teaching of grammar did not lead to better writing, rejecting traditional grammar did not necessarily produce a coherent alternative either.
As explicit language teaching declined, students could still become competent users of English, and many did, without necessarily acquiring the vocabulary to describe how language worked.
Australian linguists and educators, particularly through systemic functional linguistics and genre-based approaches, developed ways of teaching grammar as a resource for making meaning. Language could be examined in relation to audience, purpose, context and the type of text being produced. Grammar was a way of understanding the choices speakers and writers make and the effects those choices have.
This is why we need more explicit knowledge about language, but not a return to the grammar lessons of the nineteenth century. In fact, it is essential it does not become so. Moving towards a model in which students can be explicitly taught how language choices create meaning as a resource for making choices about audience, purpose, voice and effect more flexibly and deliberately, with the vocabulary to do so.
Victoria was particularly significant in this renewed interest in explicit knowledge about language.
Grammar in Victorian Curricula
The subject VCE English Language became fully accredited in 2001, creating a senior secondary subject built around linguistics. Rather than returning to the old model of memorising grammatical rules, the subject combines explicit knowledge about language with the analysis of real spoken and written texts. Students study how language is structured while asking why speakers and writers make particular choices and what those choices achieve.
Importantly, the subject reflects a contemporary Australia in which language is constantly changing in response to new technologies, globalised communication, consumer culture, and shifting social identities. It also reflects a more postcolonial understanding of language through the rejection of the ideas that Standard Australian English is fixed and unquestionable.
As such, we can now understand that variations in language are not just a response to changing forms of communication in the modern world, but are also shaped by power structures and identity politics, and reflect and challenge the social values of its time.
This approach is increasingly visible across the contemporary Victorian curriculum.
The Victorian Curriculum F–10 English Version 2.0 positions knowledge of language within the broader development of students as confident communicators, critical thinkers and informed citizens, with learning across Language, Literature and Literacy connected to meaningful communication and different contexts.
In VCE English Language, this is particularly explicit (and also defensible to suggest aspiring educators take the subject!). Students study linguistic subsystems including morphology, lexicology, syntax, semantics, discourse, and pragmatics, using a broad range of contemporary and historical texts to examine how language choices are shaped by function, register, tenor, and social and cultural context.
VCE English similarly balances close analysis of texts with the development of students’ capacity to create their own texts, VCE Literature asks students to closely analyse how literary forms, features and language create meaning. Both these studies analyse how language is influenced by historical, social and cultural contexts.
Across these curricula, therefore, grammar and language structures are resources through which students understand how language creates meaning, reflects context and enables communication.
Choosing sides in the reading wars: whole-language vs phonics
For as far back as the eighteenth century, scholars in English-speaking countries had disagreed about how beginning readers should be taught: some argued for whole-language approaches, while many cognitive scientists argued for explicit, systematic phonics.
For many Victorian teachers who went through school in the 1990s and early 2000s, today’s emphasis on explicit phonics, spelling, and grammar can feel quite different from their own schooling. Many were educated during a period strongly influenced by the whole-language side of the wars, which emphasised learning through meaningful reading and writing rather than systematically teaching the component parts of written language.
Additionally, approaches such as Reading Recovery, and later Fountas and Pinnell, also encouraged students to draw on meaning, context and other cues when reading.
As a result, many capable readers and writers developed knowledge of spelling, grammar and sentence structure largely implicitly rather than through explicit instruction.
Those who did not learn this implicitly continued to struggle. In Victoria, the advocacy group SPELD Victoria, which supports students with learning difficulties, gives its own account of this period. It describes educators taking up the idea that children learn to speak naturally by immersion in language and will therefore learn to read the same way, and it says that around one in five Victorian students are failing to learn to read, largely because of inadequate phonics instruction.
This history helps explain why some teachers who are now being asked to explicitly teach knowledge they were never explicitly taught themselves. They may instinctively know that a sentence “sounds wrong” or recognise a correctly spelled word without having learned the terminology or underlying rules needed to explain why.
From the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Victorian literacy policy increasingly sought to strengthen explicit teaching of foundational skills alongside meaningful reading, writing and comprehension.
At the same time, the very definition of literacy was expanding beyond traditional reading and writing to include speaking, listening, viewing, digital communication, and multimodal texts, as well as literacy across different curriculum areas.
The important shift today is therefore not about abandoning rich texts, comprehension, or authentic writing. It is about recognising that students benefit from both rich literacy experiences and explicit teaching of how language works.
Now, Victorian Curriculum 2.0 is a move towards explicit and systematic teaching of the knowledge that underpins reading and writing. Rather than assuming that all students will infer how the written language system works through exposure to books, the curriculum makes the progression of this knowledge more visible.
In the early years, this includes explicit attention to phonemic awareness, phonics, and word knowledge, alongside vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. As students progress beyond this F-2 focus, this develops into increasingly sophisticated knowledge of spelling, morphology, vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure. VCAA has also developed specific professional learning for teachers in Phonic and word knowledge, signalling the increased importance placed on this knowledge within English 2.0. This means that it may not just be our teachers who have gaps in language knowledge, but our students prior to 2025 (though, there are parts of it across 1.0).
Importantly, this does not mean returning to phonics instead of rich reading and writing. Victorian Curriculum 2.0 continues to organise English through the interconnected strands of Language, Literature and Literacy. The shift is towards making the underlying knowledge of language more explicit, while students continue to read, discuss, analyse, and create meaningful texts. This is why the rope metaphor works well; all strands weave in greater strength.
In other words, after decades of debate about whether children learn literacy primarily through immersion or explicit instruction, the contemporary curriculum increasingly recognises that students need both: explicit teaching of how the language system works and rich opportunities to use that knowledge to make meaning.
Writing
Creating a text is half of the Victorian government’s definition of literacy.
English progression through the Achievement Standards includes writing as a distinct strand alongside speaking and listening and reading and viewing, and it breaks writing into creating texts, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and handwriting.
Writing also starts early, but unlike oral language, it is not a biologically primary skill that is acquired naturally through exposure. Like reading, writing is a secondary biological skill. It builds on our oral language capacity but requires explicit teaching, practice, and cultural capital to develop well.
The building blocks of language, reading, and writing development can be seen in a child’s interactions with books, paper, and crayons or pencils. Scribbles, marks and pretend writing are all part of writing development, and early literacy does not mean pushing infants toward adult writing and reading. Like reading, writing depends on what a child has been given before school begins.
It cannot be solely up to a single teacher in one classroom. Literacy is a community project, requiring schools to work alongside libraries, authors, families, cultural organisations, community groups, and other partners to seek and form opportunities to create meaningful experiences for students to read, write, and communicate.
Initiatives that connect students with writers, libraries, and the wider community demonstrate what becomes possible when literacy is understood not simply as a classroom responsibility, but as a shared investment in the capacity of young people to participate in society.
There is also a larger question of whose writing counts. For most of this history, “writing” meant writing in English, in the way the colony valued and required, as outlined earlier in the history of literacy education.
First Nations peoples long held and shared knowledge through their own languages and practices before these schools existed, and any account of literacy in Victoria should include this understanding.
Who is this for?
The Education State era
In 2015 The Andrews Government’s Education State reforms placed literacy and numeracy at the centre of an improvement in educational achievement and equity.
The 2015–16 State Budget included $747 million in additional education funding, not just for literacy and numeracy but by also attempting to address the relationship between disadvantage and educational outcomes.
This emphasis continued through initiatives such as the appointment of literacy leaders and, later, the 2018 Literacy and Numeracy Strategy, which described literacy and numeracy as foundational skills and set targets for increasing the number of students achieving at the highest levels while reducing achievement gaps between disadvantaged students and their peers.
There was evidence of improvement alongside continuing concerns about equity, as the broader system and society is not built to be truly equitable. However, educational opportunity does not begin from an equal position in Australia. The funding structures that support Australian schools remain divided between government and non-government systems, with different levels and sources of public and private funding available to each sector. This makes the relationship between disadvantage and educational achievement difficult to separate from the broader structures in which schools operate.
Victoria’s 2016 PIRLS results showed an increase in the proportion of Year 4 students achieving at or above the international standard, from 80 per cent in 2011 to 86 per cent in 2016. At the same time, the Education State reforms acknowledged that educational disadvantage remained closely linked to lower achievement, making the question of who benefits from improvements in literacy as important as the overall results and means we must consider where these increases are represented.
The reforms nonetheless marked another shift in Victorian literacy education: literacy was no longer understood only as a set of skills to be taught and valued, but increasingly as a system-wide responsibility tied to achievement, equity, intervention, and students’ future participation in education, work, and society.
Again, these ideas remain at the core of why literacy education is valued today, but they also reveal the limitations of the systems in which literacy is taught.
Education remains shaped by colonial, patriarchal and ableist assumptions, and by an economic view of education that can position people primarily in terms of their productivity, employability, and contribution to the workforce.
Yet, literacy can, does, and should be more than preparation for work or a measure of individual achievement in a standardised context.
It can provide people with the knowledge, language, and confidence to understand the world around them, question the structures that shape their lives, participate meaningfully in society, and imagine and work towards a better world for all.
Indigenous learners
The question of equity becomes even more significant when we consider Indigenous students.
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The 2026 Closing the Gap Annual Data Compilation Report provides a more current picture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ literacy outcomes.
It is important to note that NAPLAN reporting changed in 2023, with the previous national minimum standard replaced by four proficiency levels: ‘exceeding’, ‘strong’, ‘developing’ and ‘needs additional support’. Consequently, results from 2023 onwards cannot be directly compared with the pre-2023 NAPLAN data. More about this will be outlined below.
The recent data nevertheless continues to show a substantial gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous students.
In 2025, approximately two-thirds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 achieved ‘developing’ or above in reading, meaning that around one-third were assessed as needing additional support (NAS). Non-Indigenous students continued to achieve higher levels of reading proficiency, with the relative difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students remaining broadly stable since the introduction of the new NAPLAN reporting system in 2023.
The Victorian Auditor-General’s 2024 review found that, in 2022, more than 20 per cent of Aboriginal students in Year 9 were below the expected level in reading, and that the average Aboriginal student was around two years behind their peers in literacy and numeracy.
The report also found that the proportion of Aboriginal students below expected levels had changed very little since 2012.
These figures demonstrate that literacy cannot be viewed as an individual skill that students either acquire or fail to acquire.
Literacy achievement is connected to broader questions of educational opportunity, disadvantage, language, and culture. Therefore, the ways in which schools recognise and value different forms of knowledge is essential to scrutinise and embed truly inclusive practice and continue to transform the system.
The 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning framework provides one example of an educational model that moves away from content to pedagogy.
Developed through work with Aboriginal communities and educators in western New South Wales, the framework identifies eight interconnected pedagogical processes: storytelling, learning through visual representation, learning through hands-on and reflective practice, using symbols and metaphor, learning through land and place, connecting ideas through non-linear processes, modelling and scaffolding, and learning through community and relationships.
The significance of this framework for literacy teaching is that it challenges the assumption that literacy is only about written Standard Australian English.
Storytelling, visual communication, oral language, place, metaphor and collaborative knowledge-making can all be understood as legitimate ways of constructing and communicating meaning.
This does not mean replacing explicit teaching of reading and writing, but rather considering how those skills can be taught through culturally responsive practices and alongside the knowledge students already bring to the classroom. Many of these ways would benefit all students.
Importantly, the 8 Ways framework itself cautions against treating Aboriginal pedagogy as a single universal method. This further supports the approach to evolving literacy practice in Victoria where the processes are interconnected and need to be interpreted within particular communities and contexts.
This represents an important development in the history of literacy education: the question is no longer simply how effectively schools can teach students to read and write, but whose languages, experiences, knowledge systems and ways of communicating are recognised as part of what literacy can be.
The Multilingual Classroom
There has also been increasing linguistic diversity of Victorian classrooms.
English is no longer being taught in a context where Standard Australian English can be assumed to be the first or only language of many students.
In 2017, Victorian government schools enrolled 6,984 newly arrived EAL learners. This number fell sharply during the COVID-19 border restrictions, reaching 2,695 in 2021, before increasing to 6,524 in 2022, 8,020 in 2023 and 8,678 in 2024, indicating that this increase will likely continue.
These newly arrived students represent only one part of Victoria’s EAL learner population.
In 2024, more than 44,000 students were assessed against the Victorian Curriculum F–10 EAL in each semester across Speaking and Listening, Reading and Viewing, and Writing. The 8,678 newly arrived students themselves came from 135 language backgrounds, demonstrating the linguistic diversity that teachers are increasingly working within and students are learning with.
This changing population has also contributed to the shift in need to address how literacy needs to be understood.
Rather than treating languages other than English as a barrier that must simply be overcome, contemporary approaches to EAL education increasingly recognise students’ existing languages and experiences as resources for learning.
What ‘literacy’ means in Victoria today
In 2026, as we near the end of the first full year of the implementation of most subjects in the Victorian Curriculum F–10 Version 2.0, literacy is broader than the ability to decode words or write correctly.
It is one of three foundational skills, alongside numeracy and digital literacy, and is defined as “the ability to comprehend and create texts accurately, confidently, fluently and effectively for learning, work and participation in the community”.
Although English carries much of the explicit teaching of literacy, literacy belongs across the curriculum. A student reading a source in History, explaining a process in Science, interpreting information in Mathematics, or presenting an argument in Health is using the particular literacy demands of that subject. All subjects are enriched by connecting to each other. Bringing poetry reading into History to understand perspectives and beliefs, writing analogies in Science to explain processes or concepts, or describing places in Geography using sensory language, uses rich literacy skills in many other areas.
A broader definition is both limited and essential, as literacy is not a collection of separate skills to be mastered in isolation. Reading and viewing, writing, speaking and listening work together (the three achievement standards of the English V2.0 F-10 curriculum), and each depends on increasing knowledge of how texts make meaning.
Vocabulary helps students understand and express ideas more precisely and flexibly across subjects and contexts.
Grammar allows students to control the relationships between words, clauses and ideas.
Accurate punctuation guides structure and interpretation.
Spelling and word knowledge support accuracy and fluency.
Knowledge of a wide range of text structures and being able to accurately identify an audience, purpose and context helps students recognise why a text is shaped the way it is.
Reading is therefore more than decoding information.
Writing is more than encoding error-free sentences.
The Literacy foundational skill outlines this interdependence as a sequence.
Its progression includes reading and viewing, writing, and speaking and listening, with elements such as fluency, understanding texts, creating texts, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and handwriting and keyboarding being some of the skills sitting within this.
While these elements are not mastered discretely, it is useful to name them separately as educators increase their ability to identify gaps or misunderstandings and teach them explicitly.
More importantly, they ultimately serve a higher goal: To empower students to understand how texts work, interpret the ideas and perspectives within them, and make deliberate language choices when creating texts of their own.
In that sense, grammar, punctuation, reading and writing are not competing definitions of literacy.
They are interconnected parts of becoming literate in today’s context.
Victorian Curriculum 2.0 and the new reading position
The latest chapter is currently being encoded itself.
The VCAA published the Victorian Curriculum F–10 English Version 2.0 in December 2023, drawing on teacher feedback, consulting the national curriculum, and revised through Victorian reference panels.
Full implementation for English was required from 2025.
English Version 2.0 is organised into three strands of Language, Literature and Literacy and the language modes (speaking, listening, reading, writing and so on) were removed as an organising structure so that students meet and develop skills across different modes and contexts. These language modes, however, still form the Achievement Standards.
It also now includes Foundation Levels A to D, giving students with a learning disability access to an English curriculum built around them as active participants.
Importantly, these changes have implications beyond the English classroom.
Literacy is not simply the responsibility of English teachers as every subject requires students to read, write, speak, listen, interpret, communicate, and use increasingly specialised language.
English Version 2.0 therefore provides a foundation for a whole-school approach to literacy, with teachers across all learning areas recognising and explicitly teaching the literacy practices specific to their disciplines.
A History teacher, for example, may need to teach students how to interpret a primary source, while a Science teacher may explicitly teach the language and structure of a scientific explanation. In this sense, literacy becomes both a curriculum area in its own right and a shared responsibility across the school. It is not instead of content, it is a part of it.
At the same time as the launch of V2.0, the department set a reading position.
From Term 1 2025, all Victorian government students from Prep to Grade 2 are taught reading using a systematic synthetic phonics approach, with at least 25 minutes of explicit phonics and phonemic awareness teaching each day.
By 2027, all government primary schools must implement this structured literacy approach.
The policy sits within a broader reading program that also includes oral language, comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary, and the Year 1 Phonics Check is now mandatory.
It is important to come back to caution, as this move must not become ‘over-correction’.
A 2026 review of early-years reading policy across not just Victoria, but also New South Wales and Queensland, found that the centre of gravity has moved toward systematic phonics mandates, while attention to meaning and to sociocultural and critical dimensions has narrowed, even though balanced approaches remain strong in policy and curriculum.
For educators, this knowledge can be used to draw on the strong evidence base for phonics while continuing to ensure that explicit instruction is balanced with rich content, vocabulary, comprehension, oral language, and engagement through diverse and meaningful experiences.
NAPLAN
The late twentieth century saw a movement to system-wide measurement as a way of increasing emphasis on educational accountability and comparable outcomes.
The growing focus on such measurements reflect a wider social and political climate. Governments use and seek evidence that public services are effective, and use such information for policy or campaigning. Education’s value is the process of learning, but then becomes something which is measured, compared, and accountable.
Standardised testing offers ways to identify students and schools needing additional support, monitor whether funding or programs are working, compare outcomes across different groups (including regions or globally), and demonstrate that the use of public funding in education produces results.
Victoria’s statewide literacy testing began in 1995 with the Learning Assessment Program (LAP), followed by the Achievement Improvement Monitor (AIM) from 2000. NAPLAN (National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy) was introduced nationally in 2008 and moved the comparison nationally.
NAPLAN has provided governments and schools with data to identify achievement gaps and students who may need additional support. It has also provided data which is used to celebrate and exemplify achievements in policy.
However, testing also has a social and emotional dimension. When a standardised assessment becomes highly visible and referenced to students, families, and schools, it can create pressure around performance, particularly for students who already experience anxiety or who have experienced difficulty with literacy (or numeracy). This in itself can affect performance or participation.
NAPLAN also represents only a snapshot of achievement and ability. A student’s performance in a particular test, using particular texts, genres, and tasks, at a particular moment in their schooling cannot capture the full breadth of their literacy development or what they may be able to demonstrate across different contexts over the preceding two years.
This creates an important distinction between assessment and high-stakes assessment. A NAPLAN report can provide useful information without becoming a judgement about a child’s intelligence, entire skillset, potential, or worth. How adults (teachers, leaders, families, and even the media) talk about the results matters here. Schools are placed in a particularly complex position. They are expected to support students and their development as whole people, attending to their wellbeing, relationships, confidence, and individual circumstances, while also being asked to demonstrate improvement through measurable achievement data in literacy and numeracy. This creates a challenging tension for all stakeholders. Educators understand that what matters to an individual student’s capacity to learn is not always what can be standardised or measured against others; at the same time, improving literacy and numeracy skills can itself contribute to wellbeing, confidence, independence, participation and a student’s sense of agency.
As educators, we can choose to not position this as a choice between achievement and wellbeing. Stronger literacy and numeracy skills reduce barriers for students in many ways, and can lead to experiencing greater success and therefore confidence.
The focus then should be this measurement being used in service of whole development, not whether the numbers themselves are the goal.
The challenge is therefore not to disregard the data, but to interpret it proportionately. Used well, NAPLAN data can prompt questions, identify patterns, and direct resources. Used poorly, it can narrow the curriculum, encourage “teaching to the test”, and turn a useful indicator (as part of a broad set) into an end in itself.
There should also be noted the shift in NAPLAN in recent years. In 2023, the previous numerical bands and National Minimum Standard were replaced by four proficiency levels: Exceeding, Strong, Developing and Needs Additional Support (NAS). Results from 2023 onwards cannot, therefore, be directly compared with earlier NAPLAN results as they are.
The data can show where gaps exist, but will not fully explain why they exist or what an individual student needs in particular. As mentioned, a standardised assessment capture everything that it means to be literate.
NAPLAN is therefore best understood as one measure of literacy, not the definition of literacy. The challenge is to use data to identify where support is needed or where potential can be further supported without allowing a number to become a judgement about the child or the school’s educators.
The age of AI
The newest challenge to literacy education, in fact, education and society as a whole, is artificial intelligence.
For most of history, writing required a person to generate the words themselves. Generative AI has changed this relationship between writer and text even more as students can now produce texts in seconds, and it appears to be sophisticated with little errors.
This shifts an important part of literacy education from being about producing a text. It is not just standardised tests, but any task in schools. Educators are not looking for text production, but evidence of learning. This raises the stakes in literacy becoming part of the skill set to produce these texts and critically evaluate, question, revise, and improve texts students encounter or create. Writing is a way of thinking.
AI makes the fundamentals of literacy more important, not less. Students need enough knowledge of language, evidence, audience, context, and purpose to recognise when AI-generated information is inaccurate, biased, or inappropriate. In fact, we want them to be able to do this with all information.
AI literacy is therefore now a part of literacy itself. Schools need to be prepared to support students to understand better how these tools work, when to use them, when to question them, and when not to use them. As humans, it is natural for us to want to find a faster way but this bypasses important learning, which should be requiring effort.
The purpose remains, though AI has added more to the list of considerations for educators.
Education then is about supporting students with the knowledge and judgement to understand the world and make meaning within it. In fact, this strengthens the need to empower our learners with tools so that they are the ones benefitting from the thinking.
Where literacy starts, and what it costs to leave gaps
Some children, often from families labelled “disadvantaged,” arrive at school without early foundations in literacy. This may look like difficulty finding the beginning and end of a book, which is the right way up for the cover, they may struggle to recognise objects in different depictions, or to retell a story.
But “disadvantage” has been loosely defined in conversation or the media, and the explanation usually offered is that it looks like a lack of text-rich environments or library/literacy access. Many of these children are also more likely to have disabilities or complex health needs, and their families often have too little support.
The stakes are high, which is why this is so important. In Australia, one in three adults has gaps in their literacy skills. Lower literacy increases the likelihood of unemployment and lost income. Because parents pass on what they can, the effects reach the next generation, who are less likely to grow up in a literacy-rich home as these parents are less likely to read or engage with texts at home.
Income and employment of families is only part of this. Literacy shapes who gets to participate in society and their community and how, whose voice is heard, and who has the power to tell and reshape the stories of their communities.
Literacy can reproduce disadvantage across generations, but it can also interrupt that cycle.
Public education has an essential role in making that interruption possible and should do this not by defining or looking for what students lack, but by giving every young person the language, skills, knowledge, and confidence to participate fully in the world and to imagine something beyond what has been expected of them.
The unfinished promise
The 1872 Act was Victoria’s first commitment to give every child the chance to read and write.
That commitment was made on land that was never ceded and is not finished. Yet Victoria has continued to lead in this space by becoming the first Australian state to legislate a treaty process with First Peoples.
The challenge now is to carry that same willingness to lead into the way we understand, teach and value education, recognising whose knowledge has been centred, whose voices have been excluded, and what it means to give every child the opportunity not only to read and write, but to be heard in ways that empower them.
Generations of children have passed through classrooms shaped by these changing ideas about knowledge, learning, literacy, and society.
The educators teaching them have also emerged from those changing systems themselves, carrying the assumptions, strengths, and limitations of the education they received while being asked to prepare the next generation for a world that is changing again.
What began as a commitment to ensure all Victorian children could read and write has grown into a profoundly complex responsibility. You need only look at the VCAA’s definition of literacy to see this.
Educators continue to do so much in a world that asks increasingly more of them.
Every child, whatever their family’s income or postcode, should be able to read what others have written and write what they themselves have to say and educators should be supported to do that.
A number plate can’t keep that commitment. Public schools can, if they are funded, staffed in a way that recognises how much education has changed, and supported to carry this enormous work that commitment now entails.
