By Jiayu Peng
Journalism intern from University of Melbourne
A primary school in Melbourne’s west has reported that student literacy skills have improved significantly following the introduction of a structured phonics program in the early years.
Tarneit Rise Primary School introduced the InitiaLit classroom program across all prep to Year 2 classrooms in 2024, earlier than the Victorian government’s requirement that all primary schools must move to explicit phonics instruction by 2027.
The school has more than 1600 students and is in one of Melbourne’s fastest growing areas. Nearly 90 per cent of students speak a language other than English at home.
Principal Nadia Bettio says the practice was introduced to ensure that it closely aligns with the school’s literacy instruction practices.
“We just really wanted to align our T1 practice with our T2 practice,” she says.
The change is particularly important for the school’s student cohort. “Nearly 90 per cent of our children are English language learners. So that’s always going to be a big challenge,” Bettio says.
The InitiaLit classroom program focuses on structured and systematic phonics instruction, which the school says helps support student’s learning.
“This approach ensures that all our children, every child in every classroom, gets that same instruction, the same lesson, same high-quality lesson every single day. It also means that the teachers can collaborate and monitor learning across not just their classroom, but across the whole cohort, because we’re all teaching the same lesson at the same time,” she says.
Schools compared cohorts of pre-students from the same time period before and after the program was introduced and assessed their progress during that same period. Since the program was introduced, the school has seen significant improvements in student outcomes.
“What we’ve noticed is the proportion of students identifying at risk has greatly diminished. In fact, it’s halved and that’s a significant improvement,” Bettio says.
The school attributes the successful implementation of this program to careful planning, adequate resources, and consistent monitoring. However, Principal Bettio acknowledges that implementing the program at a large school requires a great deal of planning and coordination.
“Implementing change is challenging at the best of times,” she says.
The implementation plan for this program was developed after a year of in-depth research and meticulous preparation. By conducting site visits to prestigious schools, participating in professional seminars, and collaborating with developers, the team built expertise and planned for whole school delivery of that program.
The rollout involved training a large number of teachers and preparing resources in multiple classrooms, and staff also undertook additional preparations to support the transition.
Bettio emphasises that this reduces teacher workloads, allowing them to truly focus on delivering the program rather than spending time preparing teaching materials, thereby making the most of their time.
The school opened in 2018 and has consistently adopted a clear phonics-based teaching method, which aligns with the Victorian Government’s move towards mandatory phonics instruction.
“This mandate aligns really closely with our existing practice,” Bettio says, “so we see this as a really positive step in supporting schools of all sorts to deliver high quality literacy instruction.”
She thinks the improvements are already having a broader impact on student learning. It can make more students able to develop strong foundational English and literacy skills during their early education.
“I think the government mandate has really supported us to harness the power and the skills within our network and across the system to really drive improvement, not just in our school, but in all schools,” Bettio says.
