This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including investigating the state of our mental health in the Great Minds series, how NZ can rebuild stronger post-Covid with The New New Zealand and how to minimise the impact of living in an Inflation Nation.
We also tackled our literacy crisis in our Reading Block series, while dogged investigative reporting by Kate McNamara resulted in an investigation into the awarding of contracts to businesses associated with family members of Cabinet minister Nanaia Mahuta.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2022. Today we take a look at New Zealand’s declining literacy rates.
New Zealand children used to lead the world in reading. Now our literacy rates have fallen so sharply that almost half our students are below their expected reading level when they finish primary school and one in five 15-year-olds do not have basic reading proficiency. In a three-part investigation education reporter Dubby Henry asked how we got into this position - and more importantly, what are we doing to get out?
My son couldn’t read - now I know why
Holly Hancox’s son was excited to start school. But within a couple of years, she says, he hated it with a passion.
Jimmy (not his real name) had been immersed in books since preschool, and his parents didn’t expect any issues when it came to reading. After all, his big sister had found it easy. But he just couldn’t get the hang of it.
He was an active kid, and had started school in April - after his class had learned their ABCs - so his teacher told them not to worry if he was lagging behind.
But at year’s end he hadn’t caught up, and his parents asked if he should redo the year.
“They said no, no, he’s a boy. He’s younger than the others, it’ll click one day.”
Next year Jimmy was in the bottom group for reading, writing and maths, Hancox said.
“He started having kids telling him he was dumb; he started feeling and saying he was stupid.”
Their concerns were again brushed off, and he fell further behind despite a summer of intensive reading practice.
Against the school’s advice, the family sought a learning diagnosis. It cost thousands of dollars but failed to pick up dyslexia. The next year Jimmy’s teacher said he was so far behind that he wouldn’t make national standards.
Both the public and private schools Jimmy attended followed what’s known as a balanced literacy programme - an evolution of the whole language philosophy that encourages children to recognise whole words, rather than sounding them out, often using contextual clues like pictures and sentence structure. While it contains some phonics instruction, it emphasises meaning and exposure to rich texts over the decoding of individual words.
Holly believes this is where Jimmy went wrong.
Stories like Jimmy’s are repeated across the country, as tens of thousands of children struggle to read and write while their classmates seem to master those foundational skills with ease.
The war over teaching reading
They call it the Reading Wars. Some say the struggle ended years ago, but passionate debate over how best to teach young children the basics of reading rages on, at least in New Zealand.
While the old fight was pitched between phonics (decoding words by sounding out letters) and whole language (learning mainly through words in context), the battleground has moved.
Developments in neuroscience and psychology now appear to point towards taking an explicit, systematic approach that emphasises the basic rules of how written language works - particularly an understanding of the links between letters and sounds, known as phonemic awareness.
Advocates say that knowledge allows children to decode words, which - when combined with strong oral language and vocabulary - allows them to increasingly build their reading comprehension until they become fluent.
But most New Zealand schools are still following “balanced literacy” with an emphasis on using different approaches depending on individual children. Phonics is part of this approach, but it’s usually not taught systematically.
As literacy rates fall, there are calls for New Zealand to move to a more explicit, systematic approach to teaching children to read with a focus on phonics and phonemic awareness.
What NZ’s new strategy means for our kids
A revamped plan for teaching literacy and numeracy in schools could signal a sea change in how New Zealand kids learn to read - but advocates for change aren’t sure yet.
The national literacy and communication action plan released in August outlined a five-year strategy to reform the way literacy is taught, including new remedial reading trials which will emphasise sounding out words phonetically.
The action plan includes a common practice model giving teachers much more guidance about what students need to know when, and the best evidence-based way to teach it.
While it will cover the entire schooling system from early childhood to Year 13, there’s a big focus on the early, foundational years of literacy teaching, as many believe that’s where New Zealand has gone wrong.