No child should be left out in the cold on literacy

This Opinion Piece by the Chair of Literacy Literacy Aotearoa appeared in the NZ Herald on 12 September 2023.

In her speech announcing National’s literacy policy, education spokesperson Erica Stanford said education is embedding inequality, instead of being a great equaliser.

Aotearoa has a poverty problem – about one in 10 children live in material hardship. But our literacy crisis is statistically even worse. An NCEA pilot a year ago found only 58 percent of year 10 students passed the reading assessment. Just 2 percent of decile 1 students passed the writing component of the same pilot. Conversely, 62 per cent of decile 10 students passed. That means almost four out of 10 kids from our wealthiest areas are failing. We can’t blame poverty for that.

For more than 40 years scientists across a range of disciplines have figured out that the brain learns to read in a systematic, sequential way, not by osmosis, disproving the whole language movement of the 1970s where it was thought children would pick up reading if they were exposed to books. The well-known reading intervention programme, Reading Recovery, is an example of this approach.

In response to Stanford’s announcement, Minister of Education and Labour education spokesperson Jan Tinetti said she was shocked National would cut Reading Recovery as it was “essential to the fabric of our education network”, and schools tell her they need a remedial approach.

Minister Tinetti claims Reading Recovery has changed in the past two years to include structured literacy. Yet, we continually hear from schools, teachers and parents that no such change has happened and the Ministry has produced no reports to support this claim. The number of schools using Reading Recovery has fallen precipitously in recent years as schools realise it does not work.

The Minister has been let down by bad advice from a poorly performing Ministry that has increasingly become an echo-chamber for those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

We agree catch-up programmes are needed – and indeed this is part of National’s policy – something the Minister’s comments sow confusion about. The ‘literacy guarantee’ ensures that the intervention provided for our most vulnerable struggling learners is grounded in the best evidence possible, replacing the $25m a year monopoly that Reading Recovery has had for the past 30 years.

Ms Tinetti’s comments reflect an education system that’s unwilling to move with the science; a tendency to be too easily offended when challenged; a legacy of protecting ineffective institutions; and a lack of accountable leadership. The culture of adults feeling offended rather than putting children first has to stop. Teachers have been let down by the institutions that are responsible for setting professional standards, which has led to every teacher having to feel their way through murky literacy instruction myth and pseudo-science.

Twenty five percent of schools have already moved to a structured literacy approach and Lifting Literacy Aotearoa is contacted regularly by teachers who will never go back. These early adopters set the direction for the urgently needed transformational change. It is time for Politicians to up-skill on the science and take the lead. Claims academics and sector experts know best, or that teachers, not politicians, should decide teaching strategies are attempts to maintain the status quo and avoid accountability for poor teaching outcomes.

It seems the leaders of our teacher unions are not up with the science either. That the organisations with the mandate to represent teachers are ignorant of the paucity of quality teacher instruction and how to support the profession to up-skill is hugely problematic and we urge them to visit schools using a structured literacy approach to learn more.

Some teachers feel education is too driven by political whim and I agree: the profession should be able to rely on the direction of professional bodies, and that those bodies will be constantly working to remain abreast of best evidence known to science. This has not been the case in New Zealand for far too long.

Structured literacy is not a scripted monolith of an approach that removes teacher autonomy and judgement. Teaching this way relies on a teacher’s in-depth knowledge of the structure of language and instructional techniques. Teaching well is an art, but not at the expense of the science. Or the learner.

One instructional casualty is too many, but currently we have an abundance of non-readers and writers. It is time that teachers were handed back knowledge and tools to teach reading that is rightfully theirs. In the absence of leadership by the Teachers Council and Ministry of Education or support of the teacher unions, it will take political involvement to get all Kiwi kids reading. It is a kind of revolution, one that takes courage and the clear and absolute determination that when it comes to literacy, no child should be left out in the cold.