Lifting literacy in Levin: Programme finds favour at Fairfield School

Fairfield School teachers Sally Rollinson and Yvonne Nicholson with Otaki MP Terisa Ngobi and deputy principal Donna Rowe.

Ōtaki MP Terisa Ngobi returned to her old stomping ground last week to check in on a new literacy programme dear to her heart.

Ngobi, a former student of Fairfield Primary School, was excited about the new teaching approach attempting to arrest falling New Zealand literacy rates.

English was a second language for Ngobi's mother Sia, who was born in Samoa. As
was often the case for many in the Pacific Island community, it was difficult to teach a language they were only learning themselves.

Ngobi said sounding out the way words are spelt and aligning that to the letters was a helpful way to help young children learn, especially for Pasifika students.

Once a world leader in early literacy, New Zealand reading levels were plummeting by world standards. It was one of 12 OECD countries where reading abilities were falling.

Ngobi joined teachers at Fairfield School who met with Lifting Literacy Aotearoa (LLA) representative Liz Cane last week to discuss the new Structured Literacy Programme.

Fairfield School was only one of three in Horowhenua to be using the new literacy approach so far, the others being Coley Street School in Foxton and Ōhau Primary School.

Anecdotally, the programme was already showing improved reading and writing results at those schools.

Otaki MP Terisa Ngobi, Fairfield School deputy principal Donna Rowe, teacher Yvonne Nocholson and literacy coach Liz Kane.

Fairfield School teacher Yvonne Nicholson said the school was already seeing an improvement in student learning. She was a strong advocate for the new system of teaching.

Nicholson said it would have strong applications for the teaching and learning of other languages, too, like te reo Māori.

Kane regularly held LLA workshops around the country, teaching teachers the Structured Literacy Approach, which focused on phonemic awareness and phonics, and associating letters with the sounds they make.

"Teaching children how to decode words with decodeable text," is how she described it.

The aim was to have the Structured Literacy Approach introduced to more schools by the end of the year. There were currently 85 schools on the waiting list for the programme.

The aim of Lifting Literacy Aotearoa was just that - raising New Zealand's reading and writing levels recognising it can have significant impacts on a students life.

Statistics showed 60 per cent of prisoners have poor literacy, while 40 per cent of adults in New Zealand have literacy levels so low they couldn't participate fully in everyday life.