Pre-primary kids improve on entry skill
Early reading and counting skills are slowly improving in children starting their education at public schools in WA, results from pre-primary entry tests have revealed.
An Education Department report on this year's "on-entry" tests, which involved nearly 24,000 four and five-year-olds, said there had been "notable improvement" for literacy and numeracy compared with the first year children were assessed in 2011.
The literacy average increased from 121.9 in 2011 to 131.1 this year and numeracy rose from 157.4 to 169.4.
But many children still struggled with basic skills, considered to be strong predictors of future success in literacy and numeracy.
More than half the children were unable to match pairs of words with the same beginning sound and just one in four was able to identify simple pairs of rhyming words such as "like" and "bike".
While 84 per cent of students could count out nine objects, just 39 per cent could count 17 objects.
The percentage of children able to count backwards from 10 increased from 53 per cent in 2011 to 62 per cent this year.
Pre-primary children do the compulsory assessments one-on-one with their teachers in the first few months of the school year to identify gaps in their understanding.
This year's results also showed that girls started school with higher-level skills than boys, particularly in literacy, and non-Aboriginal children started school with significantly higher-level skills than Aboriginal children.
Education Department executive director for innovation, performance and research Peter Titmanis said the data showed that some groups, including Aboriginal children and those who spoke English as a second language, still needed more support in the early years.
"Parents and families should never underestimate the important role they have to play as their children's first teachers, right from the time children are born," he said.
Simple activities such as reading to a child every day from birth, telling stories, singing songs and joining story times at local libraries were all beneficial.
Mr Titmanis said 16 primary schools in disadvantaged suburbs now had child and parent centres that offered services to support children's early development.
