NAPLAN results are too often treated as proof of teaching quality alone, while funding gaps, staffing shortages, disruption, disadvantage and student need are pushed out of view.

Every August the same liturgy is performed. The results are released, the commentary follows within hours, and somewhere in it a minister or an academic locates the cause of whatever the numbers show. This year that cause is explicit teaching. Numeracy has improved in Years 5, 7 and 9, and we are told this is what direct instruction, phonics and small-group tuition look like when they work. Year 3 numeracy has fallen, while reading results have also declined across the older year groups, and we are told the reforms have not yet had time to work. Give them another five years, the argument goes, and the same method credited with the gains will eventually repair the losses.

I have no quarrel with explicit teaching. Good teachers have always used its essential elements: state the purpose clearly, model the skill, guide the practice, check understanding and gradually hand responsibility to the student. What is being sold as reform is largely a return to practices good teachers never abandoned, dressed in new departmental language and presented as a discovery.

My concern is not with the method. It is with the certainty attached to it: the confidence with which governments treat pedagogy as the variable that explains the results while other influences are quietly retired from the conversation.

Consider what is being asked of the argument. If results improve, the explanation is teaching quality, newly strengthened by explicit instruction. If they do not improve, the explanation is still teaching quality: insufficient fidelity, insufficient time or an incomplete rollout. Heads, the policy gets the credit. Tails, the school gets the blame. The........

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