Learning difficulties in the Australian context: Policy, research and practice

In recent years in Australia, and more broadly, literacy and numeracy outcomes in schooling have assumed considerable prominence in education at state, territory and national levels. This has fore grounded the issue of provision of instruction to that group of students who are identified as experiencing learning difficulties. In the Australian context this group is usually defined as those students having significant difficulties in acquiring literacy and numeracy skills due to factors that are not easily attributable to social, cultural or medical reasons. In this paper we map out the field of educational provision to this group of students. We begin by troubling the notion that this group of students is somehow a homogenous, definable group whose difficulties in learning school-based literacy and numeracy can be attributed to a deficit in individual capacity is unsustainable. We then move to map the context of policy and research at a national and state level. Our aim is to set the context for the review of intervention approaches that concludes the paper. We review the research base for Reading Recovery along with intervention provided by teacher aides and support teacher learning difficulties. While we do not suggest that these approaches are the only components of educational provision for this target group, they are primary roles in the Queensland context at least, and for our purposes, as such warrant close investigation.