Getting it Right from the Start

Overview

More children are starting school without strong spoken communication — also known as oral language — and pre-reading skills, particularly children from families experiencing adversity. For these children, making the transition to literacy can be more difficult.

The aim of the project is to compare the literacy outcomes between a specifically-designed oral language and reading instructional approach in the early years of school with standard teaching practice.

The Australian Early Development Census (AEDC), a nationwide measure of early childhood development completed by teachers about all children at school-entry, shows significant socioeconomic status (SES)-based disparities across all key areas of early childhood development (domains). Children in areas of greatest SES disadvantage have the highest rates of developmental vulnerability on the language and cognitive domains (12.4%) compared to those in the most advantaged (3%) areas. These recognised inequities are also reflected in later schooling and do not resolve over time. 

Using Response to Intervention, teachers can quickly identify children who are having learning difficulties and provide targeted, evidence-based support. The aim is to help children ‘keep up’ so they don’t have to ‘catch up’. Schools can adapt learnings and processes developed through the project to any area of the curriculum beyond oral language and reading. 

Getting it Right from the Start began in 2021 and will run until 2025. It involves 16 schools from the Metropolitan, Northeast and Northwest Victoria regions. The Victorian Department of Education and Melbourne Archdioceses Catholic Schools are collaborators on the project, ensuring implementation is relevant and sustainable in schools.

Children who do not master the basics of reading in the early years of school face long-term academic challenges, are often ambivalent towards school and may face a range of behavioural, social, vocational, and social-emotional difficulties into adolescence and adulthood. Addressing these student needs becomes more challenging and expensive the further children progress through school.

In contrast, research has shown the feasibility of establishing the foundations of reading in the early primary school years to place children on more positive developmental trajectories.

Getting it Right from the Start aims to:

• embed a school improvement system (Response to Intervention) that supports oral language and reading and can be adapted to other areas of the curriculum
• understand the barriers and facilitators to implementing Response to Intervention at the school level
• enable equitable learning outcomes for all students.

Response to Intervention (RTI)

RTI is a multi-tiered conceptual framework for considering the academic and behavioural needs of children in mainstream classrooms. The RTI model provides universal access to high quality classroom instruction in language and reading for all students, while providing intensive intervention for those students identified as ‘at-risk’ (i.e. intensity is proportional to the needs of individual students). RTI supports student learning through early identification of students with additional learning needs and early intervention. 

In a RTI model:

• Tier 1 refers to universal whole of population/classroom delivery, supporting teachers to provide high-quality evidence-based instruction in oral language and reading for all students.
• Tier 2 refers to interventions targeting specific needs identified within a subgroup of students (e.g. students identified as at-risk for language and/or reading learning difficulties). Interventions are more intensively focused, allowing more time and specialised instruction for students’ skill levels. Tier 2 interventions are expected to accelerate learning and minimise the impact of difficulties over time.
• Tier 3 refers to more intensive and specialised assessment and intervention for individual students (ideally no more than 5%) based on the severity of their difficulties. 

Central to the RTI model is ongoing universal screening, assessment, and progress monitoring, that generates data to inform instructional practice at each of these tiers but also student’s placement in, and movement across, the tiers. 

Fig. 1. Response to Intervention model

Project overview and objective

Our focus will be testing the processes and impact of implementation of an intervention system in the ‘real world’. The mixed methods research design will innovatively combine (1) a staged rollout to determine impact, (2) a detailed implementation methodology to ensure that the interventions are implemented and sustained within a school system over time, and (3) qualitative data to investigate the barriers and facilitators to success. The project will focus on improving equity by targeting low language performing schools in partnership with Victorian Government Department of Education (DE) and Melbourne Archdioceses Catholic Schools (MACS) to maximise the potential of sustainability.

Our progress to date

Preparation phase

A systematic review was completed that identifies evidence-based Tier 2 interventions for improving oral language and reading outcomes for students in the early years of school. This work is a valuable resource for schools to use when considering Tier 2 interventions. This work was funded by the Victorian Government DE and MACS and published.

Preliminary step

A preliminary step was conducted in 2021 in two schools. This work identified potential barriers and enablers to implementation and informed important refinements to the main phase protocol to enable success. The paper An implementation case study for the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach for oral language and reading instruction in the early years of primary school is published.

Main phase

16 schools are involved in the main phase. Schools were randomly allocated into Cohort 1 (implementation commencement 2022) or Cohort 2 (implementation commencement 2023). As part of the project, schools aim to establish a RTI framework over 2 years. Schools are supported with professional learning (course, resources and implementation support partner). Student outcomes are collected at the start of each year. School leadership and teachers are asked to complete surveys at different timepoints and are interviewed yearly to understand the process of implementation.