2024 Year in Review: Literacy Policy

In December 2023 we published a Draft Literacy Policy Whitepaper for the incoming government. It set out why we still needed changes to literacy policy, the high level changes to policy goals that should be pursued to guide quality policy implementation and then six areas of more detailed areas for policy changes.

One year on, we wanted to take stock of the progress made by the current Government and schools against the recommendations we made, and to set out the remaining risks to robust policy implementation.

Our overall assessment is that policy has been headed in the right direction - based on our recommendations in our December 2023 Whitepaper - but that the implementation has not been as well planned out and communicated as it could have been. There is much room for improvement as we enter Year 2 of the Literacy Policy implementation. There is a lot at risk if the Ministry fails to address the implementation issues that have arisen to date or areas that remain to be tackled. But on the positive side, a lot of teachers in Years 0 - 3 have benefitted from Structured Literacy PLD this year, the funding for Reading Recovery has been redirected to Structured Literacy interventions, and we now have a high quality Curriculum to guide teaching in Y0-6.

We do not take this progress for granted - many of us fought hard to see these changes - and we are pleased that the current Minister has sought to follow through on the promises set out in the Literacy Guarantee Policy. But progress on some key areas has not yet been made as far as we can tell (eg. update of teaching standards, updated requirements for ITE providers, PLD requirements and funding for literacy intervention specialists, process for considering updates to policy and practice) and there are many areas where big gaps in the scope or depth of provision means that not all schools or all students will benefit to the same degree (eg. PLD for Y9-13, funding for literacy intervention specalists for all schools, updated assessments).

Given the piecemeal approach to announcing policy changes and funding over the year, it is not clear if there is an overaching policy implementation roadmap to guide progress. It has been hard to see the totality of where all these changes are heading and how they all fit together and what further changes may be contemplated or needed over the next 2-3 years. Changes to Learning Support need to be part of the overall plan as well. We hope that such a Roadmap will be forthcoming.

To read our full asessement across all policy implementation areas see the report here.