The number of schools offering Reading Recovery is continuing to fall. Photo / 123rf
Reading Recovery has taken another dive in popularity, with less than 40 per cent of schools now offering the programme.
The system was developed in the 1970s by New Zealander Marie Clay in order to support 6-year-olds struggling with literacy and has been used around the world.
But the number of New Zealand schools signing up for it has steadily declined from 1322 (67 per cent of schools) in 2005 to a new low of 692 this year - roughly 37 per cent of schools with 6-year-olds.
As the longest-standing Government-funded literacy intervention, schools have historically been quick to sign-up for Reading Recovery, but as the debate over how best to teach young children the basics of reading has become more heated in recent years, the uptake has dropped.
On one side is whole-language (learning mainly through words in context), and on the other side is structured literacy (a phonics-based system where words are decoded by sounding out the letters).
Reading Recovery is firmly rooted in the whole-language approach, but as New Zealand’s literacy levels continue to decline, many schools are opting to use structured literacy programmes to teach 5 and 6-year-olds how to read and write.
Structured literacy advocates, who have been fighting for an alternative to Reading Recovery for years, say the steady drop in numbers reflects the movement away from the whole-language approach. However, those leading the programme disagree.
Dyslexia Evidence Based founder Sharon Scurr said schools were no longer signing up for the programme because of a lack of evidence it worked and the results they were seeing after implementing structured literacy - a method based on the science of learning which argues all brains learn the same way.
Tawa School principal Barri Dullabh said they no longer offered Reading Recovery because they were following a structured literacy approach, were running their own intervention groups and were able to support about 80 children.
“We’re seeing some really amazing progress,” he said. “At our school, we’re seeing shifts that we were not expecting to see considering the disruptions of the past few years. We’re seeing our tail of non-achievement is reducing, and I think that’s the most exciting thing.”
Teachers and teacher aides were able to pull aside small groups or individual children for five to 10-minute sessions every day to go over skills in small chunks and “make sure there was mastery before we move on”, he said.
Dullabh said he too believed the drop in uptake was because of a shift to a more “evidence-based approach”, structured approach to literacy.
He knew of other schools in Tawa that had also stopped offering Reading Recovery in favour of other interventions.
A July report by Lifting Literacy Aotearoa said schools using a structured literacy method of teaching told them they did not use Reading Recovery because it was inconsistent with or undermined the rest of their literacy teaching.
Schools that did offer it did so because it was the only tier-three intervention funded by the Ministry of Education, but they would rather Reading Recovery funding be opened up so they could use a structured literacy intervention instead, the report said.
Ministry of Education general manager of New Zealand curriculum and Te Whāriki Curriculum Centre, Julia Novak, said Reading Recovery was one of several literacy supports funded by the ministry.
The ministry also funded Better Start Literacy Approach and Programmes for Students, which both offer targeted literacy support for groups of students, as well as a range of literacy and learning support specialists, she said.
Schools could also choose to use operational funding to buy programmes offered by third-party providers, she said.
Dr Rebecca Jesson, leader of the National Reading Recovery Centre, said the drop in numbers was because teacher shortages meant schools did not have the resources for one-to-one support; there were substantially more children needing help, especially during and since Covid; and the politicisation of Reading Recovery influencing parents’ views of it.
“Reading Recovery is not about a specific approach to teaching literacy like structured literacy. It is about whatever the child needs to make progress in their reading,” she said. “Not all young learners learn in the same way.”
But the fight may soon be over for New Zealand’s structured literacy advocates, with National signalling its intention to wind the programme down altogether as part of the “literacy guarantee” it campaigned on.
Before the election, National’s education spokeswoman Erica Stanford said the party would mandate the use of structured literacy in schools and reprioritise funding from Reading Recovery for structured literacy interventions instead.
Over the last three years, Reading Recovery has undergone its biggest overhaul in decades, with the Ministry of Education this year requiring providers use “a structured approach to literacy” in all three tiers of Reading Recovery and “teach learners to use letter-sound patterns as the primary technique for decoding unknown words”, with context used to help children understand the meaning of words.
Jesson said the changes were in response to the decline in uptake and meant teachers were now being equipped with structured literacy approaches. methods of measuring student knowledge of phonics and decodable books.
She said Reading Recovery tutors were successfully working alongside structured literacy approaches in many schools.
Reading Recovery providers Auckland, Otago and Waikato Universities, reported back to the Ministry of Education on outcomes of the first two terms of this year in a document provided to the Herald under the Official Information Act.
According to the report, Reading Recovery tutors had largely been helping classroom teachers use structured literacy assessments to identify which students were struggling and helping them use the Ready to Read Phonics Plus series developed by the Ministry of Education.
The report identified the next steps were to “continue to investigate the alignment between a structured literacy approach and Reading Recovery and explore ways to enact this alignment with teachers in sessions”, and to have some tutors trained in the Better Start Literacy Approach.
The data showed an improvement in students’ knowledge of letter sounds, letter names, phonemic awareness and reading between Terms 1 and 2 among tier-two Reading Recovery students (group sessions for children not progressing after their first two terms at school), but gave no comparison of how it compared to previous years in which there was no inclusion of structured literacy.
In a written response to the report, the Ministry of Education also questioned how the improvement in students’ phonics level compared and whether it was expected.
Jesson said since 2021, tier-two students had made double the average class progress, and tier-three students, who received individual lessons, made about triple the average class progress.
Jesson said the changes provided assurance decoding skills were being taught in a structured way and the tiers meant there were whole-class, small-group and one-to-one approaches used as needed.
“We help those that have not made progress in their reading after programmes such as structured literacy have been delivered in the classroom,” she said.
The debate isn’t limited to New Zealand, with the American state of Ohio this month becoming the latest region to ban literacy teaching methods involving “three-cueing”, prompting the Reading Recovery Council of North America to file a lawsuit against the state.
Three-cueing is used in the whole-language method and instructs students to make sense of the text and identify unknown words by considering the context and images, sentence structure and, as a last resort, sounding out the word.
Other American states including Indiana, Arkansas and Louisiana have also banned the strategy.
