The true extent of illiteracy among children in the Northern Territory has been underestimated, with thousands of students lacking the most basic skills, researchers say.
Charles Darwin University Associate Professor Tess Lea is evaluating the progress of the National Accelerated Literacy Program (NALP), which aims to accelerate the literacy of marginalised students.
But the multi-million dollar education intervention has also brought to light alarming new figure on the numbers of children unable to read or write.
"As the program expands, we are beginning to confront the true extent of the deficit in the Northern Territory," said Prof Lea.
"We had about 2,000 students enter the program last year that could not read at all.
"The majority of them were five and six-year-olds, students you might expect to have emergent reading skills.
"But most alarming, more than 350 of these students were aged 12 and older."
Prof Lea said there were a number of explanations for the blowout, including that more schools were now putting struggling students into Accelerated Literacy classrooms.
It was also possible that schools with with more extreme education conditions were coming on board.
"Either way, it goes to show that thousands of territory students are desperately short of where they should be," she said.
"They risk missing out on life opportunities because they have not acquired the foundational literacy skills in early childhood that are essential for students to read and write at advanced levels."
There are 5,167 students from 58 government schools in the NT who are part of the NALP.
In 2005/06, Prof Lea said students had progressed at a rate more than one and a half times faster than expected.
Literacy progress declined in 2007 due to an enormous influx of students into the program who could not read at all on entry.
"Last year, students were learning to read on average 1.18 reading levels per year," she said, adding that the results proved the children were more than capable of learning.
"It goes to show we're not dealing with kids that can't be taught," Dr Lea explained.
"In fact, it's an amazing achievement when you consider the proportion of older non-readers that entered the program and the extremely high levels of teacher turnover in some schools."
