In summary:
- One-third of Australian students are not meeting NAPLAN literacy benchmarks, a trend Distinguished Professor Pamela Snow sees as a public health concern, not just an academic one.
- Research shows low literacy increases psychological distress, while strong literacy acts as a protective factor across childhood and adolescence.
- Understanding the difference between constrained skills (e.g. decoding) and unconstrained skills (e.g. vocabulary) helps psychologists strengthen assessment and consultation.
- Professor Snow highlights Response to Intervention (RTI) as a public-health-aligned framework that prevents academic and behavioural difficulties when Tier 1 instruction is strong.
- Psychologists play a vital role in evidence translation, data interpretation and advocacy, particularly for students without access to additional support.
- She will explore these issues at the APS College of Educational and Developmental Psychologists Conference in Melbourne on 13-14 February.
Children's literacy should be treated as a public health issue, says Distinguished Professor Pamela Snow, upcoming speaker at the APS CEDP conference.
For three years in a row now, Australian school students have failed to meet "challenging but reasonable" levels of literacy and numeracy, according to National NAPLAN results. This year's results uncovered that a third of students fell below the benchmark.
For Distinguished Professor Pamela Snow, this doesn't just signal a sustained academic challenge, but also a concerning public health challenge.
For example, research suggests that young people with high literacy levels are less likely to experience psychological distress and that those with lower literacy levels are more likely to experience depression or anxiety.
Professor Snow's career began as a speech language pathologist and she subsequently gained registration as a psychologist, working in academic (research and advocacy) roles to influence and reshape how our nation teaches children to read.
Working with people with acquired brain injuries, a topic she also explored in her PhD, first drew her into questions of information processing, memory and learning. Later, research roles in school-based drug and alcohol education deepened her interest in risk and protective factors across childhood and adolescence.
“Partly wearing my speech pathology hat, I became interested in language and literacy skills as risk and protective factors,” says Snow, who is a professor of cognitive psychology and Co-Director of the Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab in the School of Education at La Trobe University.
“That led me into a couple of decades of research with young people in youth justice, child protection and flexible, alternative education settings, looking in particular at their language skills and also at their literacy profiles.”
Over time, a pattern emerged. Professor Snow saw that literacy was acting as a powerful fault line in the life chances of the children and adolescents she encountered.
“We weren’t managing to leverage the protective benefits of reading proficiency for all children in the early years of school,” says Professor Snow. “Some became successful readers, but too many didn’t – and we needed to ask why that was happening and how it was being justified.”
At the APS College of Educational and Developmental Psychologists Conference in Melbourne on 13-14 February, Professor Snow will argue that psychologists have a critical role to play in answering those questions – and in ensuring that the next generation of children do not fall through the cracks.
Reading as a public health issue, not just an academic one
For Professor Snow, literacy is squarely a public health and mental health concern, not just an academic outcome, because failing to build strong early foundations can have lasting consequences.
“We’re a wealthy first-world nation, but struggling students are more likely to come from poor communities, to be geographically isolated or to be Indigenous. They’re bearing an unreasonable burden around low reading proficiency because we’re not respecting and applying the evidence about how to get all children across that bridge in the first three years of school.”
“If you’re not on track by Year 3, you’ve got less than a 20 per cent chance of catching up,” says Professor Snow. “That’s pretty diabolical, and where catch-up does occur, it takes a lot of resources."
From a developmental and psychological perspective, she frames reading as a biologically secondary skill.
“Oral language is biologically primary – it’s what humans have an evolutionary advantage for,” she explains. “Reading, writing and spelling are biologically secondary skills. We can learn them, but we need to be taught. Some children are exposed to high-quality instruction as a matter of luck; others experience much more hit-and-miss instruction.”
For psychologists, this framing matters. Reading proficiency shapes engagement, self-concept, behaviour and long-term mental health, she says.
“When we lift our reading data, what we see is a huge lift in student engagement and wellbeing,” says Professor Snow. “This isn’t just about academic success. Children should do well regardless of their postcode. It shouldn’t be a lottery.”
Inside the decades-long debate about how children learn to read
If the evidence for early, explicit instruction is strong, why has it taken so long to influence practice? Professor Snow traces the resistance back to entrenched ideas within parts of the education sector.
“For the last 50 years or so, the dominant approach in many education faculties has been this thing called 'whole language' – the idea that reading is a natural thing for children to do,” she says. “The argument was if we immerse them in beautiful children’s literature and read to them a lot, they’ll acquire a love of reading and just start reading.”
The problem, she argues, is that this view overlooks the neurocognitive realities of reading acquisition.
“We’ve got language brains, to use Steven Pinker’s phrase, but we don’t have reading brains,” says Professor Snow. “We can develop a reading brain if we’re explicitly taught how the writing code works, because the text on the page is a code. To understand the text, we have to understand how that code works.”
She says that in many faculties of education, starting with that code-focused instruction has been “deeply opposed”.
Teaching phonics explicitly has been caricatured as encouraging children to “bark at print”, says Professor Snow, rather than as a necessary technical proficiency, such as learning that a particular musical note on a page corresponds to a particular key on the piano.
“In response to several national inquiries that did not endorse whole language, it was rebadged as balanced literacy,” she says. “Balanced literacy sounds reassuring, but in practice it often meant very light-touch phonics, treated as a last resort, and it didn’t privilege teacher knowledge about how the English writing system works.”
She says teachers were encouraged to rely on predictable texts and to use pictures, context and guesswork, rather than teaching children how to decode unfamiliar words systematically.
From the perspective of the science of reading, this creates a bottleneck in the very skills beginning readers most need.
“We talk about constrained and unconstrained skills,” says Professor Snow.
Constrained skills, she explains, are the finite body of knowledge about how speech and print map to each other – sound–letter correspondences, common spelling patterns.
Unconstrained skills include things like vocabulary, sentence comprehension and background knowledge, which keep developing across the lifespan.
“The argument from the science of reading perspective is that we want to knock the constrained skills out of play really early. We want decoding to be effective, efficient and fast, so children’s cognitive resources can go into higher order skills, [such as] vocabulary, sentence comprehension and background knowledge."
For psychologists working in schools, understanding this constrained/unconstrained distinction can sharpen assessment, case formulation and advocacy.
Response to Intervention: a public health framework for literacy equity
In her APS CEDP conference keynote, Professor Snow will explore Response to Intervention (RTI) – a framework she sees as critical to preventing academic failure and behavioural dysregulation.
“RTI really is a public health prevention framework,” she says. “It’s a triangle with three tiers and it’s fundamentally concerned with preventing academic failure and problems with behavioural self-regulation.”
Tier 1 focuses on universal prevention, which is high-quality mainstream classroom instruction in every room, every day.
“We use high-quality data-monitoring tools to keep track of children’s progress,” says Professor Snow. “It’s not a wait-to-fail approach. We’re being proactive in finding the red flags for academic struggle.”
Tier 2 involves targeted small-group interventions to help students catch up efficiently.
“If we get Tier 1 right, only about 10-15 per cent of students should need extra support at Tier 2,” she explains.
Tier 3 is reserved for the 5-10 per cent of students who require intensive one-to-one support, often those with identified neurodevelopmental differences that make reading, writing and spelling more difficult.
“The important thing about RTI is that we don’t do different things at the different tiers – we just increase the 'dose',” says Professor Snow. “We’re giving children more exposure and more opportunities for practice and mastery, not changing to entirely different methods.”
When Tier 1 instruction is weak, schools experience a “bleed” into Tier 2 – where many more children need support than the system can realistically serve, creating bottlenecks and inequity.
“Schools that adopt the RTI framework and get Tier 1 right have fewer and fewer children needing additional support, but then they have the resources to devote to those who truly need Tier 2 and/or 3,” she says. “Getting Tier 1 right is absolutely critical.”
In its essence, RTI creates a clear structure for how assessment, consultation and data interpretation can support whole-school practice, not just individual referrals.
Where psychologists fit – and how to have more impact
So what can psychologists working in educational and developmental contexts do, practically, to contribute to literacy equity?
Professor Snow argues psychologists need a working understanding of the cognitive and linguistic underpinnings of reading.
Psychologists do not need to be literacy teachers, she clarifies, but a working understanding of constrained skills such as decoding and phoneme-grapheme mapping – and how these interact with unconstrained skills like vocabulary and background knowledge – strengthens assessment, consultation and case formulation.
Psychologists can act as translators between research and practice, she says.
“Education as a field has a history of fads and fashions, of not being held accountable and not applying the idea of levels of evidence like we do in psychology, in medicine, in nursing, in aviation and engineering,” says Professor Snow.
Psychologists are trained to think about evidence hierarchies and are therefore well placed to support schools to sift through competing claims and focus on approaches with strong, evidence-based foundations.
Finally, she emphasises the advocacy role – particularly for children who do not have parents able to fund private tutoring or specialist support.
“There will always be some children who succeed because their parents can pour in extra resources,” she says. “But all children should be exposed to high-quality, rigorous reading instruction."
Psychologists can be powerful voices in making that non-negotiable, she adds.
For early-career psychologists and postgraduate students, literacy may not seem like an obvious area of focus. Yet Professor Snow believes it is one of the most high-leverage domains in which to work because when we improve reading outcomes, we don’t just change test scores, she says, we change trajectories for engagement, behaviour, mental health and long-term life chances.
"Literacy is a profound protective factor.”
At the APS College of Educational and Developmental Psychologists Conference in Melbourne on 13-14 February, Professor Snow will delve further into this topic. Her accompanying workshop will ‘demystify’ the English writing system, unpacking why it looks chaotic on the surface, how its historical layers actually work, and what that means for assessment and intervention.