Education Minister, Eric Stanford has only been in the role for a few months and is already making positive, and largely popular, changes.
The cell phone ban during class time has got widespread support from teachers, pupils and parents.
Yesterday’s announcement on structured literacy has also been well received:
Yesterday’s announcement on structured literacy has also been well received:
Structured literacy will change the way New Zealand children learn to read – improving achievement and setting students up for success, Education Minister Erica Stanford says.
“Being able to read and write is a fundamental life skill that too many young people are missing out on. Recent data shows that just 56 per cent of Year 8 students are at the expected level for reading, and just 35 per cent for writing,” Ms Stanford says.
“Domestic and international evidence shows this method is the most effective way of equipping children with strong reading skills that are critical for their futures.
“A number of schools in New Zealand are already teaching structured literacy and have experienced significant improvements in student achievement. I want all children to have this opportunity.
“That is why, beginning in Term 1 2025, all state schools will teach reading using the proven structured literacy approach.
“Structured Literacy is about getting back to basics and teaching children to read by using sounds and phonics to understand words.
“This Government has set an ambitious target of getting 80 per cent of Year 8 students to curriculum level by 2030, and teaching structured literacy is a critical part of how we plan to get there.”
The rollout includes a $67 million commitment as part of Budget 2024 to support:
- Professional development on structured literacy for teachers.
- Books and resources for schools and teachers.
- Introducing phonics checks to assess student progression.
- Additional support for students that need it.
“Structured literacy goes hand-in-hand with our requirement for schools to teach an hour a day of reading, writing and maths, as well as implementing a curriculum that is rich in knowledge and clear about what students should be learning and when.
“Today’s funding announcement ensures teachers will receive the training, support and resources they need to deliver this.
“Our teachers are amazing and we are supporting them to deliver improved outcomes in reading and writing.”
Literacy is one of the very important keys to future success for children. Too many haven’t been achieving as they need to with the current method of teaching reading.
Structured literacy will give far more children a much better chance of learning to read, and read well.
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A better way to learn, funding for professional development and additional support for pupils who need it is a recipe that gives hope for the future.
Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.
5 comments:
Ever since the huge success 40 or whatever years ago of the elderly private tutor in Paraparaumu who succeeded with children who had failed at school, the superiority of phonics has been well known. Phonics also helps with writing, whereas the Marie Clay osmosis system does not. No coincidence that our writing standards so low. It is incredible that it has taken so long for anyone to take a strong line. But there is more make work right through the profession in the Marie Clay farce. And it is very dangerous for any teacher to go against the Teaching Council and their established fashions. A parallel exists in the current pro maori emphasis. Eventually someone will react to the emperor has no clothes aspect of this too and be sufficiently bold to take action. Maorification make work jobs are being eliminated elsewhere and there is huge scope in Education.
Thank you Robert, for mentioning my late mother Doris, who dedicated her retirement years fighting in the 'bloody 'reading wars for a return to systematic explicit phonics .This ,taught in her early teaching years of the 1930s and '40s, in NZ state schools achieved Universal Literacy and NZ gained top ranking in reading Comprehension. Now tragically we rank as the worst achievers in this in the English speaking world.
I acknowledge also the hard work of Profs. Tom Nicholson and James Chapman and others who also weathered the fury of the Whole Language (WL) camp in re-establishing a similar sort of historical phonics, aka Structured Literacy, into tertiary institutions and led the Ministry into accepting some of it.
In 2000. there was a parliamentary inquiry into NZ reading, and very many hundreds of teachers and a handful of academics who advocated phonics put in submissions. Unfortunately they were rudely ignored by the powerful WL disciples of Dame Marie Clay and her devotees here and worldwide.
I believe we should learn from this very foolish four to five decades cult following of WL, aka Balanced Literacy and Reading Recovery. Somehow it persisted despite being thoroughly unscientific. It ruined our original world class education system and boosted support for the overarching ideology of Progressive Education, out of which it grew, This toxic ideology, with little focus on effective learning needs to be rooted out of all other academic school subjects at all levels,since it destroys their integrity and rigor as well.
Duncan Garner is to be commended on his forthright article on Stuff today '20 billion dollars invested per year and our children can't read write or count'.
Perhaps Gaynor can remind of the exact era I remember. The lady hit the headlines when her private students were kicked out of Reading Recovery classes at school and the parents took exeption. Years later My wife was a RR tutor, applying the MC system. I sat in on a few sessions but reckoned I could have done better myself with phonics remembered from the 1940s. At work when young colleagues asked how to spell some word, I would sound the letters phonically. Of a different era, they obviously were not familiar with.
Systematic explicit ohonicss was taught right from the first day of schooling from about 1930 to 1960 in NZ using the NZ "Whicombe and Tombs "Progressive Readers' and ' Phonic Readers'. Next came the 1950 English 'Janet and John' reading books which were dominantly look and say ,whole word based but did still have phonic word lists and emphasis.
They were replaced in about 1960 by NZ little 'Ready to Read' books which had even more whole word emphasis and very minimal phonics, Those students however who failed to read well were given USA readers and workbooks that were often phonic based. The very worst readers were the Whole Language predictable reading books of the 1980s which caused an enormous number of reading failures and were antagonistic to phonics. Hence the great need apparently for reading Recovery which was more of the same wrongness. These WL books are still used meaning for forty years in effect we have been inflicted with the worst possible and destructive reading system with no science bases. Phonic readers were introduced in 2022 but with little phonic instruction given to teachers.
My mother Doris,used with reading failure students in the 1970s to about 2000 ,the phonic system and method she had learned in the 1930s. It has most of the same components as Structured Literacy which is just resurrected historical phonics we used to have to achieve Universal Literacy and high standards. So we had in the past what is now shown to be completely proven correct by science.
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