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Australia is producing too many children who can't read or write while $20m put aside to fix the problem remains largely unspent. Julie-Anne Davies reports.

Harry Potter has been credited with many things, not least getting children interested in reading again. So it is ironic that at a time when kids are desperate to plough through J.K Rowling’s latest book, many Australian children are simply not up to the task. Their problem is simple: they can’t read. Last Friday new national literacy figures were released which show that one in 10 Australian Year 7 students fail to meet the national reading benchmark. The rate for indigenous children is disastrous, with one in three eight-year-olds failing to achieve the most basic reading milestones.

Parents have been worrying about their children’s literacy for years but more recently politicians have done the sums and worked out that reading and writing is a red-button issue with voters. Former Labor leader Mark Latham understood this. His first parliamentary question to John Howard after being elected leader was on childhood education and he followed up by unveiling an ambitious plan to spend $100m on a national program to encourage parents to read to their kids.

Education Minister Brendan Nelson took notice and so did the prime minister. In the lead-up to last year’s federal election, the Coalition counter-punched with its own pitch to parents, announcing a $20m reading scheme. It struck all the right aspirational chords; Year 3 students who had failed to meet the national reading standard in 2003 would get $700 worth of private tuition. But an investigation by The Bulletin reveals that of the 24,000 children identified as needing extra reading help, very few have received it. Nelson admits that more than a year after announcing the $700 voucher scheme, only about 5000 students have signed on for extra reading help. Inquiries to state education departments and the private companies contracted by the government to run the tutor programs shows just how dismal the response has been.

So who is to blame? Nelson is crystal clear on this point. He accuses the Labor states and territories of deliberately sabotaging the voucher scheme by failing to inform parents of their children’s eligibility and thus depriving them of the help on offer. “I feel like the bloke running the lottery who knows there are people with winning tickets out there but I can’t contact them to tell them they’ve won.” Nelson says he wrote to all education ministers in May telling them that if they were not prepared to let parents know that their children were eligible for the scheme, then he was prepared to do it for them. He asked for the names and addresses of the children but so far has received nothing back. “Some states have yet to even inform school principals that they have pupils who can get this extra help. And other states simply don’t keep details of which children failed the test. It is shameful.”

He will find a way around the state’s “obfuscation” because “I am not to be underestimated on this one”. Nelson credits his mother with getting him a tutor when he was performing abysmally in Year 12 maths. “I went from 25% to 95% and that changed the course of my life, so I know the difference good tutors can make.”

Federal Labor education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin argues that some parents may be hesitant about going to outside providers for the extra assistance instead of working with teachers they trust. She says the government’s implementation of the scheme has been a fiasco. “The children waiting for assistance did not meet the Year 3 three literacy benchmark in 2003. Many of the children are now approaching another literacy benchmark test in Year 5 without receiving any additional assistance.”

One of the stumbling blocks has been the appointment of brokers to run the scheme on behalf of the federal government. In Tasmania, there was not one expression of interest and the state government reluctantly stepped into the breach only last week. In the Northern Territory, home to some of the country’s most disadvantaged children, not one of the 860 pupils who qualified for the tuition voucher two years ago has been helped. No broker can be found and Nelson says the situation is so dire that he will probably ask his own department to run the scheme.

Tasmanian Education Minister Paula Wriedt, one of the scheme’s most vocal critics, says $700 worth of tuition is not the panacea parents have been led to believe. “A $700 voucher is not going to solve the nation’s literacy problems. Dr Nelson’s prescription is like an antibiotic for the common cold. It’s easy to give but doesn’t actually fix it.”

The critics of the scheme – notably all the Labor states and territories and the teacher unions, but educationalists, too – argue that running a private teaching program in isolation from a child’s school instruction just doesn’t work. And they say that 10 weeks of tuition is not enough for a struggling eight-year-old reader.

Teachers are especially scathing. “It was a mischievous, headline-grabbing policy that was cynically aimed at parents,” says the Australian Teachers Union Victorian president, Mary Bluett.

“It’s been a profound non-event,” says Kevin Pope, principal of Sunshine North Primary in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. His students are precisely the children the scheme is targeting. The majority live in poverty and most come from non-English-speaking families. Yet not one child from the school has been signed up for the $700 worth of extra reading assistance.

It’s a no-brainer, Pope says. To qualify for the tuition, children must have completed a statewide test to measure their literacy proficiency. At Sunshine North, where the children come from the Horn of Africa, Vietnam and the Middle East, they are just trying to learn English and make themselves understood. Asking them to complete statewide assessments is “pie in the sky”.

And even if they had done the test, their parents are unlikely to have been able to read the letter they were sent informing them of their child’s eligibility. “We tried to promote it but the cold, hard fact is that this scheme denies access to the very people it is meant to get to.”