Australian primary English curricula and their planned exclusions

Correct spelling is at least 50% of every basic literacy task. All words do have to be written accurately before we can require students to read them. Yet the most recent Australia wide test of the spelling for age skills of Australian school children occurred all the way back in 1936: a distance of precisely 11 entire primary school generations (!) As I explained in my earlier article (and will explain more fully in a later article) Australia's yearly national NAPLAN tests do not conventionally test student spelling skills.

There is no excuse for this longstanding nationwide failure in the survey testing of spelling skill: via a radio or television program, government education authorities could, at least theoretically, test all school students in Australia in a matter of only 20 minutes. This would probably make it the most inexpensive and thorough national literacy survey of the lot.

Then why hasn't this been done, you ask? All too likely, the survey testing of English spelling skills in this way would arm Australia's many parent and lobby groups with far too much highly relevant data.

Notwithstanding, when there have been no new national school based standards set for English spelling skill in a period of 77 years, how can any modern Australian school stake a claim to excellence or even normality in its spelling skill?

The disqualification of Australia's literacy curriculum writers

Let's quickly summarize this article. The 'literacy basics' that most politicians in living memory have promised to push our schools to get back to, comprise a total of only 3 basic skills. These 3 skills have been deliberately de-emphasised to points of extinction by all Australian education authorities. During the course of over a century, the first 2 of these skills have not even once been systematically surveyed by any school system in Australia. The third skill, spelling, was last nationally survey tested 77 years ago.

So when it comes to the essential testing and teaching of the 'literacy basics' in Australian schools, Australia's English curriculum writers in all the high places are much worse off than merely out of date. Even in the October of 2013, they remain deliberately ignorant of the 3 most vital skills that are critically relevant to the success of the very literacy curricula that they disseminate among Australian teachers of literacy.

How did Australian English curriculum writers manage to so completely lose sight of the literacy basics?