A Tasmanian cattle farmer has become so concerned about his step-daughter’s struggles at school, he decided to take matters into his own hands.

Fed up with an education system that he feels is letting children down, self-described “angry farmer” Marshall Roberts took a deep dive into the science of literacy to find out the best way to help 11-year-old Iris Duncanson with her spelling and reading.

The teaching method Mr Roberts is using with Iris is proving so successful he is now campaigning for it to be used more widely in schools.

“She is really making great gains,” Mr Roberts said. “It brings tears to my eyes, literally.”

Alarm bells started ringing when it was clear that Iris struggled with spelling and reading fluency at school, despite having extremely strong reading comprehension and vocabulary skills.

She was diagnosed with a specific learning disorder consistent with dyslexia.

“We’re lucky in that she hadn’t lost any of her confidence and she also has other strengths but certainly we realised that she was a long way behind where she needed to be,” Iris’ mum Mez Wilson said.

“Dyslexia runs in my family … my younger sister has dyslexia, it was diagnosed really late … and it’s really changed the course of her life and she feels it’s closed a lot of doors for her.”

The Orton-Gillingham ‘OG’ approach

Despite receiving extra support in a smaller group at school, Iris’s spelling deteriorated further.

That is when Mr Roberts began his research.

“He pretty much read everything that was available to him,” Ms Wilson said.

“He’s worked really, really hard to all hours of the morning for months and months and months.

“He did that while also … single-handedly running the farm and [being] a dad.”

Eager to understand how best how to help Iris, Mr Roberts undertook a course in the Orton-Gillingham “OG” approach to teaching.

It is based on the understanding that letters represent sounds, and these phonics are the backbone of “decoding” new words.

Mr Roberts said teaching those small parts of language in a structured, systematic and repetitive way was key.

“I look at it as less like throwing a kid into a swimming pool and telling them to swim and more like saying, ‘Ok this is how the stroke works … once you’ve got that stroke working, we’re going to show you how to put your head in the water and breathe either side,'” he said.

Iris and her nine-year-old sister Luka Duncanson now spend a minimum of around 40 minutes a day doing home tutoring with their mum and stepdad.

“I think it helps a lot,” Iris said.

Mr Roberts said the results of using a systematic approach were clear.

But Mr Roberts’ concerns have gone beyond his own family and children who have dyslexia, who he called the “canaries in the coal mine”.

He said current methods for teaching literacy in schools are “quite hodgepodge” and “doesn’t have the degree of repetition and drill and consolidation”.

Mr Roberts said: “There is a large number of kids who will learn under the current model but there is almost equally as large percentage who won’t and will therefore have lifelong problems.”

The science of learning to read

Associate Professor Nenagh Kemp from the University of Tasmania’s School of Psychological Sciences is the co-editor of the UK-based Journal of Research in Reading.

She said reading was not a natural ability like speech or understanding speech.

“It’s kind of a later addition in human evolution so it’s not something that comes naturally for many kids,” she said.

“You’ve just got to practice many, many times just as you might learning to drive or learning to dance …. until it becomes fluent.”

Many Australian classrooms use a balanced literacy approach which involves using lots of different methods to teach children to read and write.

Like the systematic approach that Mr Roberts is using, phonics are taught but in a less structured way.

Children are exposed to readers with repeated words, predictable sentence structures and lots of pictures.

“It can involve some direct teaching of what sounds make what letters, it can be guessing what a word might be on the basis of its first letter or It can be thinking about what the text means without worrying about individual words,” Associate Professor Kemp said.

She said the science of the best method for teaching reading and writing was clear.

“A systematic…. direct approach definitely in all the research has been shown to give more improvements at the time and to be maintained years later than the balanced [literacy] approach.

“If you don’t learn those basics you can’t keep going, at some point you can’t just memorise whole words indefinitely at some point that’s just too many words to remember and you have to be able to break them up and sound them out.”

Tasmania has ‘lowest level of adult literacy’

A 2012 OECD study published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics report into adult literacy found 40 to 50 per cent of Australians aged between 15 and 74 are functionally illiterate.

That means being able to read at a basic level but not being able to use that skill for more complicated daily living and employment tasks, like working out the instructions on a bottle of medicine or how to follow a postal voting form.

Tasmania has the lowest level of adult literacy in the country according to the 2006 Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey.

The Tasmanian government has committed to an ambitious plan to improve literacy outcomes.

In 2021, then-education minister Jeremy Rockliff said: “By year 7, all young people will meet an expected reading standard that is above the national minimum by no later than 2030.”

But Mr Roberts fears the plan is being undermined from within the Department of Education.

He said the department is using education consultants who have a stated leaning towards a balanced literacy approach to teaching reading.

He has started an e-petition calling on the Tasmanian government to seek the advice of the Australian Education Research Organisation, which was created following the Gonski review to evaluate education research and improve learning outcomes for children.

Farmer considering legal action

CEO of the Australian Education Research Organisation Jenny Donovan said some “ineffective” teaching approaches continue to be used such as “whole language, multi-cueing and balanced literacy.”

“These practices have been debunked by researched and are inconsistent with what cognitive science tells us how learning happens,” she said.

Dr Donovan said teacher training in evidence-based reading instruction was “patchy across Australia”.

Mr Roberts wants to take his fight for changes to the way literacy is taught, further.

“I am investigating a class action,” he said. “To me, it almost seems like wilful neglect.

In a statement, a spokeswoman said Tasmania’s Department of Education “is committed to improving the literacy of all Tasmanians”.

She said the Department “is involved in current research projects with the Australian Education Research Organisation and will continue to engage and collaborate with the organisation on best practice for teaching literacy and numeracy.”

She said in 2023, the department has a more explicit focus on supporting students to be effective readers with a focus on the years before school and an evidence-based curriculum that includes a systematic approach.

Tasmanian president of the Australian Education Union David Genford said the teachers and support staff were doing their best “to try and make sure that literacy levels are on the increase”.

But he believes a lack of resources is behind poor literacy rates.

Mr Genford said more funding was needed.

“At the moment, we’re seeing students underfunded by about $1,800 each a year.”

He said that money could be used to facilitate smaller group tuition to help students struggling with literacy.