MPs Urged Not to Leave Change to Chance
Lifting Literacy Aotearoa were invited to make an oral submission in support of the petition of Amanda Drumm to the Education and Workforce Select Committee today, 12 May 2021.
If you are interested in what we, and the other submitters said, we provide a transcript below, can also be downloaded here. And you can watch a recording of the session here (forward to 29 minutes for our submission).
Amanda’s petition was first presented to the Committee in June last year - it has been a long time waiting to make an oral submission.
The petition was signed by over 1,100 people and asks:
That the House of Representatives pass legislation requiring that all new entrant teachers and Year 1 teachers are trained in explicit and systematic phonics instruction, so that they can teach all children to read effectively and efficiently, thereby including all dyslexic students.
This petition was actually the spark that ignited the fire that led to the formation of LLA.
We will continue to seek to engage with MPs to build their awareness and understanding of the science and what they can do to move change along in the right direction.
Amanda Drumm
Parent, author of petition
Good afternoon. I’m Amanda Drumm and I’m the author of this petition.I am the mum to a 15 year old boy, who has dyslexia.
I submitted, spoke in 2015 - at the inquiry into the identification and support for students with the significant challenges of dyslexia, dyspraxia, and autism spectrum disorders in primary and secondary schools.
I had hope for my boy then! He was 10 and he had just been professionally diagnosed with Dyslexia. Like other parents, we have spent thousands on diagnosis and tutors and other fixes. Some working, others, snake oil.
You see, he was taught sight-reading in year 1, a balanced literacy approach – the very worst way to teach a dyslexic – and he was on “the wait to fail model” and fail he did!
In year 2 he was put into Reading Recovery and we have been paying the price for this ever since! I NOW know that Reading Recovery is not evidence based and it taught him how to guess a word and not how to decode a word.
Our story is the same for many other parents who have children with dyslexia.
We had many, many mornings of a crying child, not wanting to, or dreading going to school. Not being able to read words like his peers, made him frustrated and highly anxious and he felt “dumb” & “stupid”. His words – not mine!
Sadly, the Ministry of Education is still ignoring decades worth of science, by allowing our schools to continue to teach using whole language and balanced literacy instead of switching to an evidence based, science proven, systematic structured literacy approach.
We are allowing generations of children growing up in NZ, to feel “stupid,” and “dumb,”
It is a breach of our human rights! We are failing our children...!
A Systematic Synthetic Phonics Programme, is now statutory in all primary schools in the UK
WE ARE ASKING FOR THE SAME HERE IN NEW ZEALAND!
YOU now HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO make a difference for future generations.
All of our kids should have the right to learn to read!
Thank you for your time today.
Jason Miles
School Principal
Kia ora koutou
Ko tumuaki aho
Ki te Te Kura o Ruataniwha Kaiapoi North School
Ko Jason Miles toku ingua
I am the proud principal of Kaiapoi North School, a Year 1-8 full primary school in North Canterbury, a current roll of 510 delightful children.
I am speaking today in full support of Amanda Drumm’s petition for explicit and systematic phonics initiatives to be taught in NZ schools from a NE level.
Prior to 2018 KNS taught reading using the whole language approach - an approach that has been NZ focus for teaching reading for many years, whole language is what our trainee teachers are taught, it is what is the focus of MOE professional learning contracts and resources has been, and it is the focus of Reading Recovery - which is the only major learning intervention available to schools. In using the whole language approach - despite extensive professional learning and highly skilled teachers - we could not shift our overall school achievement data in reading from around 65-70% each year.
We knew we needed a change but we didn’t know what until a newly appointed Resource Teacher of Literacy introduced our leadership team to the 40 years of international research in the Science of Reading - how the brain best learns to read - and to the Structured Literacy approach. After our highly skilled junior team leader trialled the structured literacy approach with her new entrant children we knew that we had to make the change for all of our children based on the unprecedented reading achievement and confidence of these children.
We were fortunate enough to have the expertise of Liz Kane work with our teachers to teach them about Structured Literacy as experts in the structured literacy field are in such short supply. After a lot of learning and a major shift in practice for our teachers we started to implement Structured Literacy School-wide in 2019. SL includes:
Explicit and systematic phonics instruction which is crucial for learning to read.
A clear scope and sequence is followed from less complex to complex with continual review. Nothing is left to chance - no more children guessing what a word might be from picture cues - they use their phonetic knowledge to solve words in all contexts.
Phonemic awareness - learning about the smallest units of sound in spoken words (phonemes) - there are 44 in the english language and these are taught in a deliberate progression. This leads on to Phonological awareness - understanding of broader sounds, including words, syllables, rhyme. And phonics - teaching the acquisition of letter-sound correspondences - phoneme to grapheme in reading and spelling.
Fluency - accuracy of and rate of reading
Vocabulary - understanding of words and meaning including morphology of words
Comprehension - understanding which is the goal of reading and result of mastery.
The shift in reading achievement results at KNS are like nothing else I have seen in any area of the curriculum over my 25 years as a principal. Our initial group of new entrants in 2018 are now all reading at or above curriculum expectations and almost 90% of all of our Year 0-3 children that began their learning using a structured literacy approach are reading at or above curriculum expectations.
We've got one in five adults in New Zealand who are not literate. What are we doing as a country, what are we doing as educators about that? If you think of a life without reading what sort of a life is that? You've got a lot less choices in your life if you cannot read and it's our responsibility as educators to do the very best that we can. We've found out a lot through research about how our brain best learns to read and we need to use that as educators, and as a Ministry of Education to provide our teachers with exactly what they need and to teach our tamariki using the structured literacy approach."
Bronwyn Bayne
Lifting Literacy Aotearoa Steering Committee Member
Our hope is that we have sparked your curiosity and that you have heard enough today to realise that:
We can’t keep doing what we have been doing with literacy instruction for the past 30 years;
Being able to read and write underpins achievement in other areas and is critical to future success and wellbeing;
The way we teach reading has the biggest impact on reading outcomes and can be changed;
The strongest evidence currently available suggests that Structured Literacy prevents students from struggling unnecessarily and is effective for all;
The number of schools making the change to SL is rapidly increasing as more learn about the research and the results of other schools who have made the change already;
You can help support the Ministry of Education and Faculties of Education to fully embrace a truly evidence-based approach, make change happen faster across the sector, and reduce the risks of poor implementation.
We recommend that you take the time to understand the Science of Reading and call for more submissions on evidence-based literacy instruction and the experience of this approach in NZ schools, and then feed that into the Ministry’s Curriculum Review .
We owe it to our children and grandchildren, and frankly ourselves to stand up and not leave change to chance.
Thank you.