Post modern clap trap rules in schools

Then the principal started to investigate what science was telling us about how children actually learned. She read with excitement the seminal 2006 British Independent Review of Teaching and Early Reading, which found that a vigorous program of phonic work needed to be embedded in the curriculum, and saw the British National Literacy Strategy that was developed from rigorous inquiry.

She approached a first-year pre-primary teacher who agreed to try this "new" method - that class outperformed all the other pre-primary classes at the school.

Gradually, Challis persuaded and inspired teachers to embrace this way of teaching, returning and deepening their understanding and skills on the way.

By 2011, they had turned around the traditional disadvantage and, at the end of the pre-primary year, the gap between Challis children and the state average had closed.

By the end of last year, the pre-primary children had surpassed the state average.

The Australian government's National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy found in 2005 that literacy instruction should be "grounded in the basic building blocks of reading" - namely the set of integrated sub-skills that include letter-symbol rules, letter-sound rules, whole-word recognition and the ability to derive meaning from written text.

It did not support the "reading is magic" philosophy.

The inquiry chairman, Ken Rowe, observed three years later that he regretted that, despite the clear direction of rigorous research, very little had changed because "higher-education providers of education and those who provide ongoing professional development of teachers, with few exceptions, are still puddling around in post-modernist claptrap about how children learn to read".

One of the reasons I decided to run for federal parliament was to confront this problem.

To me, it is immoral to allow so many Australian children to be victims of a failed educational fad. We are not just failing to teach these kids to read - we are destroying their confidence as learners. We teach them to hate school.

We are also setting up this country to be a loser in the globally competitive market.

It is time for federal intervention. The states have shown an inability to address this problem. Securing our future as a clever country depends on it.